The Last Interview: A Novel, The Last Interview

Did you always know you would be a writer?

No. But at some point in my adolescence, I realized that my masturbation fantasies were much more detailed than those of my close friends. With them it was always as bare bones as a mug shot. With me there were obstacles, conflicts, rounded-out characters. If I wanted to be aroused by my fantasies, I had to believe them, so I constructed them in great detail. I remember a night we spent in sleeping bags in the basement of Hagai Carmeli’s house, four close friends, and each one talked about his fantasies. I was the last one to speak, and by the time I finished, everyone was fast asleep, except Ari. Before zipping up his sleeping bag for the night, he said in a drowsy voice: Bro, I think you’re going to be a writer. But you have to learn to cut it down a little.

What motivates you to write?

A teacher of mine once told me to keep a journal during the Passover vacation. I took a notebook to Ras Burqa and every once in a while I would take it up into the hills and write about the world beneath the water and the one above it.

Then my parents decided to move from Jerusalem to Haifa. I wrote a few protest poems against the move, but as usual with protest poems, it didn’t help.

After that, in twelfth grade, we had an end-of-year show and Tali Leshem played the flute. I wanted to be around her as much as possible in the hope that she would notice me, but I had no talent—I didn’t sing or dance or play a musical instrument. So I volunteered to write the lyrics for the songs in the show.

In the army, I wrote Tali letters. I thought that if she received a letter from me every day, she wouldn’t leave me for someone who came home more often.

In South America, after the army, I wrote letters to Dikla. Sometimes I wrote her about things that happened on the trip and sometimes I made up things that didn’t happen. I noticed that I enjoyed writing the made-up things more.

Dikla and I split right before I joined my first writing workshop, after I’d graduated from university, and every word that came out of me there, maybe even ever since, was an attempt to fill the huge space created by her absence.

A year later, Dikla and I got back together.

Then I made a few choices in my life: marriage, kids, a mortgage.

Life moved onto a much too narrow path, and writing was the only thing outside it.

The life I couldn’t live—I wrote. It worked for a few years, numbed the longing a bit, but then Ari got sick and Shira went away to boarding school. And Dikla no longer delighted in me.

That was the beginning of one of those times. A crisis, I think it’s called. I figured it would be over in a few months, but I was wrong.

People on the outside don’t see it, but I know I’m sinking. And I know that now I write to survive.

What does your workday actually look like?

For the last year, I’ve been waging an ongoing war, a trench war in every sense, against dysthymia: an acute mood disorder characterized by a chronic, low-grade feeling of depression. In simpler terms: Once I used to wake up happy and now I wake up sad. I’m not sure I know why, I have no idea how to shake it off, and I don’t know how much longer Dikla can take it. Lately I’ve had the feeling that she’s keeping her distance from me. Maybe she’s afraid she’ll catch it.

Anyway—my morning always begins with strenuous physical activity, running or bike riding, which is supposed to release mood-enhancing substances into my bloodstream. Then I call Ari and we talk about Hapoel Jerusalem basketball, the nurses in the department, the chance that the Shabak S rappers will reunite—anything but his illness. Though the conversation is meant to cheer him up, it cheers me up too and takes the edge off my intense feeling of loneliness. Then I doze off for a while, wake up, drink two cups of coffee one after the other, eat an entire bar of milk chocolate, and turn on my computer like someone who seriously intends to write his next novel. I sit in front of the blank screen. A few minutes later, I wander over to this interview, which was sent to me by an Internet site editor who collected surfers’ questions for me. I answer one or two of them. Three at the most. Now it’s one thirty already, my middle child is home from school, and the racket she makes in the living room is so distracting that there’s no point in continuing. So I turn off the computer and go to make lunch. We sit down to eat together. She’s been really prickly this last year, and I, with my dysthymia, find it a little hard to take. Nevertheless, I still try to get to her through the tangle of thorns that has suddenly shot up around her, but that’s so tiring that after lunch, I have to take a nap. I set the alarm so I won’t be late to pick up my sweet little son from day care. When he sees me come in, he laughs with joy and runs to me, and for a moment as brief as a song, it seems that everything will be fine.

How autobiographical are your books?

Once, I knew how to answer that question. I mean I knew that I would always respond with blatant lies to protect myself and the people close to me. But I also knew the truth, which is that there are and always were bits of autobiography in my fiction, usually in the female characters. To throw readers off the track.

As time passed, things grew more complicated. Because, for example, what can you do with a book that predicted what actually happened in your life? You think you’ve created a far-out plot, something really bizarre. Then a year after the book comes out, the plot becomes reality. Is that autobiography?

And what about all the “behind-the-scenes” stories I tell the readers at those meet-the-author evenings, stories that are supposed to reveal the personal experiences that led me to write my books? From constant telling, those stories have become so polished and refined that I’m not sure anymore that they actually happened.

Not to mention the habitual tale-telling that has slowly trickled into my personal, nonliterary life.

For example, when I visit Ari in the hospital.

Before we went on our big trip together, my grandmother asked me: Who are you going with? When I said, With Ari, she sighed and said, Very good, he’ll take care of you.

Now his strong, sinewy arms have shriveled. And his once full cheeks are sunken.

He asks me to get him a glass of water from the cooler, and when I come back, we begin to talk.

Once, I used to tell him what was going on with me. Today, I tell him well-constructed anecdotes. And I see in his chemotherapy eyes that he knows I’m telling him a well-constructed anecdote, and he wants, he needs me to tell him one unpolished thing, something that has no beginning, middle, or point.

But I can’t tell anything but stories anymore. Everything that happens in my real life, from the moment it happens, is adapted into a good story I can tell sometime. When I meet with my readers. In interviews. In my hospital conversations with Ari, who closes his eyes while I’m speaking, takes my hand, and says: Let’s shut up for a minute.

What are you working on right now?

The truth is that I’m still recovering from the previous book, or more precisely, from the endless emptiness that comes after I publish a book. That’s when I invest most of my energy in trying not to fall in love. The year after publishing a book is dangerous. You walk around with such a powerful inner hunger that people can see it from the outside. And the easiest way to satisfy that hunger is to fall hopelessly in love. Let’s say with a Slovakian documentary film director with a scar on her left cheek that looks like a dimple who you meet at the Haifa film festival. A passion that takes you a year to recover from. So it’s better to stay home. Withdraw from the world. Seal off your heart. To prevent any crack from forming that would allow a woman other than your wife to enter. That’s what I’m working on now.

As a man, how do you manage to write female characters?

No one notices, but all the female characters in my books are actually variations on the same three:

My wife.

The fictitious woman who is the negative image of my wife, the woman I had to give up any possibility of being with when I decided to get married.

The woman who is me.

I’m embarrassed to admit that it’s the third woman I’m most attracted to.

How do you deal with the exposure involved in publishing a book?

I googled myself once. What a mistake. I spent all night reading things people wrote about me. Once, during a school trip, I pretended to be asleep and heard two kids talking. About me. This time, there were a lot more than two. Maybe a thousand. Maybe two. On one site, they even posted a picture of the sunspots I have on my cheeks and demonstrated how to photoshop them out. I finally went to sleep at four in the morning. The nasty retorts kept rising in my throat. I spooned myself against Dikla’s back. Once, when I did that, she would take my hand and put it on her heart. Not lately. Lately, I’m no longer sure she loves me. Nevertheless, I matched the rhythm of my breathing to hers and whispered to myself: I have a home. I have a home. I have a home. I didn’t sleep a wink that night, and I suddenly began thinking about—of all people—a neighbor we’d had years ago. An elderly woman—you might even call her old—who once gave me a ride to the sea and, on the way, told me she belonged to a nudist group. And I, only nineteen, loved the idea and asked if I could join. To expose myself.

Dawn was already visible through the shutters. My wife was still breathing the even breaths of sleep.

Everything is foreseen, but there is freedom of choice.

What kind of kid were you?

Too much like the crying kid whose picture hung on the wall of the medical clinic. While we waited our turn to see Dr. Schneidtesher, the other kids would point alternately at him and at me.

I delighted in imagining. Not reading but constantly imagining.

And I fell in love. Head over heels. With a different girl each time. But I never said anything to her. And I felt a persistent sense of longing. I remember myself, from an early age, always longing for what was gone. No one had died yet, but we kept moving house. I’d say goodbye to my old friends every summer, and every autumn I was supposed to find new ones. It’s not clear, by the way, that that’s the reason I felt a permanent sense of longing. Maybe that’s just how it is, some kids zigzag their way forward through life and others are steeped in longing for the past.

I try to isolate a concrete moment among all those emotional words. That’s what I ask my students to do, be concrete. Dismantle the feeling into specific pictures. But with all the pictures, I don’t know what—

I was six, maybe seven, and Grandpa Itzhak took me to an amusement park. He was pretty old already and didn’t have the strength or desire to go on the rides. So he just walked from ride to ride with me and occasionally convinced me to drink water from the army flask he’d brought with him. It was fine with me that he didn’t join me on the rides. Being alone didn’t frighten me then. I got on the roller coaster alone, happily, and didn’t scream at all, not even on the steep descents. I found the ghost train to be mostly amusing. The Ferris wheel was an opportunity to look down at the entire city from above. Not even a shadow of fear passed through me—until I reached the hall of mirrors.

A seemingly innocent attraction—so innocent that I don’t think it exists today.

All you had to do was find the right path from the entrance to the exit in a hall lined with mirrors.

It started out fine. I took the first and second turns in the labyrinth quite confidently, but then I became trapped inside my own reflections. I remember the moment: I was surrounded by many distorted images that did and didn’t look like me. Some of them had a large head and skinny legs, others the opposite, fat legs and the head of an alien. I felt slightly dizzy and had a strong feeling I’d never had before of no way out. I tried to keep walking, but wherever I turned, I encountered my distorted self. Again and again. In the end, I collapsed, defeated, into a sitting position, my back against a wall, and thought, there’s no point in calling for help because Grandpa doesn’t hear well without his hearing aid. And I thought, I will never get out of here.

Now I suddenly realize how similar that is to the nightmare Dikla woke up from in terror during our first years together. She would jolt upright and pound her chest as if she were choking. Then she would look at me with wide-open eyes, not knowing who I was, and when she suddenly recognized me, she’d ask me to hug her. I didn’t have to ask her what happened, I knew that she’d once again been trapped in the classroom and couldn’t get out because the terrorists were guarding the door, and she tried to open the window so she could get away and couldn’t do it. (In life, not in nightmares, the tragedy in Ma’alot happened when her mother was pregnant with her. The ninth month. They lived right next to the school the terrorists had invaded, and when her mother heard the children’s screams, she ran into her neighbor’s house, where she knew they had a hunting rifle.)

It’s amazing, I think, that two people whose worst nightmare is to be trapped between four walls had managed, somehow, to build a home together.

Where do you write?

For years I wanted a studio. I wanted to say things like, “I’m coming from the studio.” “I’ll call you from the studio.” But it seemed to be the sort of thing that happened to other people, not to the ones who grew up in a port city and were taught not to spend a penny unless they really had to. Who needs a studio anyway, I convinced myself. Amos Oz wrote in the toilet.

Nevertheless, whenever someone, a colleague, told me he was going to his studio, my heart constricted, as if it had been encircled by a tight elastic band. And involuntarily, the word rolled around in my mouth. The tip of my tongue tapped lightly on the roof of my mouth with the first two syllables and the third spread my lips: stu-di-o.

More than a year ago, I rented a studio in the moshav Givat Chen. I had no choice. I swear by everything dear to me.

The building next to ours was being renovated, and the horrendous noise of the drills and hammers kept me from concentrating. Also, my eldest daughter—before she left for boarding school at Sde Boker—didn’t really go to school, and to drown out the racket coming from outside, she played Enrique Iglesias at full volume every morning in her room. Slowly, the walls began to close in on me. A feeling of unease settled in between my stomach and chest and refused to move. I think that was when my dysthymia began, even though I still didn’t know that there was such a thing as dysthymia. So I thought, I need a change of scene, and took my laptop to the office of a psychologist who worked mainly in the evening. I agreed to all the demands she said were preconditions, asking only that, in the contract, we change the definition from “office” to “studio.”

After moving my laptop to the studio, I added a few books, for atmosphere. I hung a painting I’d received as a gift from a Holocaust survivor, which Dikla said was too sad to hang in the living room, and placed Mayan’s picture on the shelf. Walking distance from the studio was a grocery store that sold fresh, salty bagels. And olives. I like olives when I’m writing. There was an orange tree outside the studio and the landlady said I could pick the fruit. In the studio itself, there was a coffee corner with instant coffee, Turkish coffee, and a fridge with milk in it.

Everything was ready.

Givat Chen—so I learned from the sign at the entrance I passed every morning—was named after the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik. No one talks about it, it’s not very nice to tarnish the image of our national poet, but Bialik hardly wrote anything after immigrating to Israel. Apparently, as he once wrote, his little twig had fallen, leaving him without bud or flower, fruit or leaf, and for ten years, he produced only nine poems, which are not among his best. Was the house they built for him in Tel Aviv too beautiful? Too comfortable? Did people’s adoration rob him of the freedom every artist needs? And perhaps all his literary activities, the journals and book publishing, left him no time to stare into space, and without that, without allowing empty space to be empty, how can you replenish yourself? Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe he took on more and more literary activities to avoid being alone with his unable-to-write self? I picture him telling his wife, Manya, before going to sleep that another day had passed without his having produced a poem worthy of the name, and the weary look in her eyes as she listens to him: Really, Chaim Nachman—she thinks but doesn’t say—how long can I listen to the same song?

He waits, eyes open to the darkness until she falls asleep, and then leaves the house to walk the few blocks to Ira Jan. She’s a passionate woman, an artist who is still impressed by him, and after they have sex, he waits with eyes open to the darkness until Ira Jan falls asleep, then goes to another woman, the third—we can assume he had a third woman—to lay his bald head on her lap so she can stroke it as she sings to him in Yiddish. But all that bed-hopping in Tel Aviv is no help at all, it changes nothing, because the page waiting for him on his desk the next morning is blanker than usual.

I spent long months in my studio in Givat Chen. I read my students’ texts. I spoke on the phone. I answered e-mails. I went to the grocery store and came back with olives. I picked oranges and squeezed them. I stared at the picture of Mayan, the girl who was killed on Death Road and in whose backpack my book was found. I listened to entire David Bowie albums on YouTube. I read medical articles about dysthymia. I told people, “I’ll call you from the studio.” “Let’s meet at my studio.” I even tried to do yoga on the psychologist’s yoga mat and threw my back out. Maybe it’s the dysthymia that has nailed me so firmly to reality. Maybe other forces have been at work here.

In the end, I decided to go back home.

Go back home.

The tip of my tongue waited patiently to tap lightly on the roof of my mouth as my lips alternately opened and closed around those three words.

Do you think about your reading public when you write?

Me? Are you kidding? Absolutely not. It’s irrelevant. And I have no time for it. My mind is so filled with the characters’ vacillations and the plot twists that there’s no room for extraneous thoughts. I categorically deny—

Only sometimes, like a streaker dashing onto the field in the middle of a soccer game, a powerful sense of anxiety about money bursts into my mind: What if they don’t like it? What if they don’t buy it? How will I make a living? For long moments, that anxiety manages to evade the guards of my self-confidence until they finally catch up to it, grab it a bit too hard by the elbows, and escort it off the field.

Do you imagine a specific reader when you’re writing?

For years, I imagined Dikla. I would picture myself reading the manuscript to her in bed. Reading a page and dropping it to the floor. Reading another page and dropping it to the floor. And she would listen and look at me with the same warm, supportive expression tinged with amusement she’d had before we kissed the first time in the apartment on HaRamban Street.

Recently, it hasn’t been working for me. Imagining Dikla as I write. I think the problem stems from the way she’s been looking at me since Shira left for boarding school. Her expression is no longer warm and supportive, and it’s tinged with criticism.

Do you remember that I’m flying to Colombia on Sunday? I asked her last week.

Yes, she said.

Once, that “yes” held the anticipation of yearning for me. Once her “yes” said: I’ll miss you.

This time, her “yes” said: It’s actually a good thing you’re going away for a while. To tell the truth, I’ve become tired of you.

I’m not a child. I know that, ultimately, the energy between two people is destined to change its shape. It’s a law of physics. I’ve seen it happen with other couples, and in fact, I knew that it would happen to us sometime.

I just never thought it would happen to her first.

A few days later, I sorrowfully packed a bag. Underwear, socks. Copies of my books and students’ manuscripts.

Usually, I look forward to traveling.

Usually, when the plane begins to soar, so does my spirit.

How do you live with the way people interpret and analyze your books?

I take it in stride. Really. That’s the beauty of literature, with every reading, the book is somehow rewritten, right? And that’s fine with me. Besides, what can I do? Follow everyone who buys my book from the bookstore to his home, then get into bed with him and make sure he understands?

Simply speaking: Everyone is invited to read my books however they want to.

Except for a certain academic type.

Usually from the literature faculty.

Sometimes you can find them in the cultural criticism or gender studies departments. They’re people who have been indoctrinated by the twisted promotion and tenure mechanisms of the university to focus on a very specific niche. Again and again, they publish articles that examine the same research question. And they compel their students to feed on the same square meter of pasture. They’ve been doing it for so many years that they can read a book only through the narrow prism of their research.

I was once invited to one of those academics-with-theories conferences.

I was happy about the invitation, I must admit. Artists need recognition the way scientists need proof. I even snapped a picture of the poster with my name on it at the entrance to the liberal arts building and sent it to my parents, to make them proud.

But later, at the conference itself, people with advanced degrees took the stage one after the other and imposed overly methodical readings on my book, speaking in authoritative, omniscient tones that made me feel like an ignoramus. I hunched over in the first-row seat that had been reserved for me, and with every knowledgeable sentence spoken on the stage, I withdrew further and further into myself. I put my head in my hands, pressed my elbows against my chest, felt my chest stick to my stomach, until I finally disappeared entirely and the presenter apologized in my name, explaining that personal reasons had kept me from attending the conference.

Can you make a living as a writer?

I always fumble for an answer to that question.

I explain that it’s a small market. Mention that I also run a workshop. Point out that Dikla is the business development manager of a large firm.

Sometimes I have no choice and I also tell the well-known story of Hershel of Ostropol, whose mother sent him to the grocery store for milk. When he left the store, he was suddenly struck by the fear that the milk was spoiled, so he took a healthy swig before continuing on his way. But then he was struck once again by the fear that the milk had spoiled during his walk. And drank again. Just to make sure. And so he continued walking and stopping to take a drink, until he reached home, and was sent to buy milk again.

As far as I know, there is no such story about Hershel of Ostropol. It’s a Yiddish tall tale that makes everyone smile in understanding when it’s finished even though the moral of the story is not exactly clear to them.

That’s how I dance around a simple truth: We’re fine.

When I left the ad agency to focus on writing, I said to Dikla, Listen, we’ll have to cut back.

She was pregnant with our first child, Shira, not the best time for such a conversation.

Nonetheless, she immediately said, So we’ll cut back.

I remember every word of what we said. I remember where we were sitting: in the small kitchen of our rented apartment on Yeldei Teheran Street. On folding chairs.

I remember what she was wearing: A white maternity top with buttons and a ribbon that tied under her breasts. And black leggings.

I even remember what was on the plate that sat on the table between us. Sunflower seeds. From the beginning of that pregnancy, she had a powerful craving for sunflower seeds, and the entire house filled up with small mounds of shells.

Are you sure? I asked.

I’d like to remind you that you didn’t marry some princess from a mansion in Savyon, she replied, and that has some advantages. Besides, I’m sure your book will sell and everything will work out.

And if not?

We’ll manage. Hello, I’m here too, you know. And that’s the dream you’ve been talking about since we met. To write.

Okay. Should I run down to the kiosk and get you some more seeds?

Later, she said, and pointed to the bedroom.

Again? I sighed. As if I didn’t want to.

It’s not me, she said apologetically. It’s the hormones.

The list of things that attracted me to Dikla is very long. Among them are some small, seemingly unimportant things such as the smell of her shampoo or the fact that she knew by heart the plots of David Bowie music videos from the eighties. There were larger things as well, like the fact that she wasn’t a flirt and didn’t form opinions based on what she read in the weekend papers, and she looked away during extra-violent scenes in TV series.

But I think that the hidden element, what drew me most profoundly to her, was that she didn’t have a critical bone in her body. She accepted me and believed in me from the first moment. No undermining or attempts to fix me. She showed her love for me exactly the way her father showed his love for her at the family dinners in Ma’alot. With the warmth in his eyes whenever he looked at her. With the softness in his voice when he called her “my little girl.” With the eggplant-and-tahini salad he made especially for her. With the quiet but clear excitement for her every achievement, no matter how small.

That’s how Dikla loved me then. Without reservation.

It never occurred to me that, twenty years later, I would call her again and again from Madrid before boarding the connecting flight to Colombia, and she wouldn’t answer.

How do you deal with criticism?

My parents are very critical people. Not to your face, of course. But they’re both academics, which means that they painstakingly examine everything taking place in their immediate radius in an effort to prove it fundamentally erroneous. For example, for years they’ve been coming to our place every Monday to babysit their grandchildren. Many things have changed during those years: Every time they arrive, they’re a bit more stooped. And they tend to get emotional much more often. My father has developed a chronic cough and my mother doesn’t hear very well anymore. Shira, the apple of their eye, has gone off to boarding school. And still, after every visit, they give us feedback. My father in a long text that includes clauses and subclauses; my mother in a phone conversation that begins in an empathetic tone and continues with a detailed description of all the mistakes we’re making as parents.

Take a look at yourself, I want to say. But don’t. Because I don’t want to be disrespectful. Because of the effort they make to come here every Monday.

In any case, when you grow up in that kind of environment, the need to criticize seeps into you, becomes part of you. It flows in your blood like another sort of cell: white blood cells, red blood cells, critical blood cells.

All that discouraged me for many years, and even now, sometimes flings me backward and downward (the movement is always backward and downward). But it also immunized me. After all, the harshest criticism is written in my mind even before the book is published. Now too, as I write, I take a potshot at myself: Are you crazy? Answering an Internet interview honestly? Now it’ll be available for years to anyone who googles you.

Did you ever have writer’s block?

Are you kidding? I have writer’s block every morning. This whole interview—to confess the truth—is an attempt to deal with writer’s block in a different text.

What is most challenging about writing?

The minute I start writing, I have an urge so strong that I can’t ignore it, the urge to eat. I go into the kitchen after every page. No, after every paragraph.

But that physical hunger is something I can deal with.

The real problem is a different kind of hunger.

Your books are very Israeli. Don’t they lose something in translation?

I wish I knew. The truth is that I have no idea. At a dinner with my publishers in Turkey, for example, they told me that they had to cut several erotic scenes from the book because the Erdoğan regime had recently begun to harass publishers who weren’t careful enough. I sat there as if nothing had happened, nonchalantly ordered sütlaç for dessert, and thought: Who knows how many times this has been done, in other languages, in other countries, without anyone bothering to tell me.

Generally speaking, there is something fictitious in the whole business of translations. You go to a foreign country. They invite journalists to your hotel. It’s a two-star hotel, so there’s no lobby to speak of, just a small corner with an uncomfortable couch. You sit on that uncomfortable couch for three days. And are interviewed. Some of the journalists represent publications with names like Quinoa Chic, Unshaved Men, or Dogs and Sleds, and they seem a bit too friendly with the publisher’s PR woman. You can also see, or think you see, slight physical similarities between them and her, and you begin to suspect that these interviews have been prearranged: All the PR woman’s relatives have been recruited to give you the feeling that there’s enormous media interest in your book. Even though that week, in the country you’re visiting, a new book by Axel Wolff was published.

Your suspicion grows stronger when you suddenly realize—how did you not notice it before?—that even after years of work trips abroad, you have never actually seen someone reading a translated copy of your book. Not in cafés. Not in the subway. Not on trains. For years you walked through train cars, ostensibly to get the kinks out of your lower back but actually in the hope you would see someone, on the left or on the right, with your book. One reader would be enough to restore your confidence in the reality of your existence. But on the right and on the left, in the standard cars, the first-class cars, and the reserved-seat cars, everyone’s reading the new Axel Wolff.

Conspiracy theories begin to sprout in your mind, maybe some convoluted plot has been hatched behind your back by Udi, your devious agent, the Israeli Foreign Affairs office, and the publisher that’s hosting you. They all know it’s just a facade, they all make an easy profit from the fact that your book has been published but not distributed, and you, the only Truman in The Truman Show, keep traveling abroad, still believing that this time it’s happening, this is your breakthrough.

The last trip was to Colombia, and something in the combination of the huge quantities of rum, the terminally run-down hotel whose only occupants, apart from you, were Japanese, and the streets full of totally nonliterary beggars blurs the line between reality and simulation. It makes you feel untethered, like an astronaut outside his spaceship, repairing a glitch, whose cable suddenly disconnects.

After the series of interviews, you spend the free time you have left in Bogotá making the rounds of the bookstores that are open late. Axel Wolff’s new novel in Spanish translation appears in all the windows. You go inside and look for your book on the central display tables. You search the eye-level shelves, then the lower ones. Your book is not on any shelf, not in any store. In one of them, you swallow your embarrassment and go over to the counter to ask. The clerk checks the computer and says they don’t have any in stock. But he can order it for you if you wish. When you go out into the street, you hit the lamppost just to see whether it hurts.

After the sixth tequila, in a bar where all the patrons look like extras hired for a bar scene, you pay the bartender and begin walking to your hotel. You remember that when you were a kid in the fourth or fifth grade, your social life improved miraculously in only a few months. In the time between Hanukkah and Passover, you went from being shut out to being sought out, and the shift was so sharp that you suspected your parents had set it up. That they had bribed everyone, boys and girls, so they would be nice to you. For an entire year, you walked around with that suspicion, looking for signs to reinforce it. And now, thirty years later, you’re right back there.

You want to call home. Speak to your wife. Hear a familiar voice. Grab on to something before you finally lose your balance. But the time difference. And the expense. Besides, whenever you’ve called her from abroad recently, she hasn’t answered, and if she has, there was no indication in her voice that she missed you. And there are other signs: She stifles yawns when you insist on foreplay, she doesn’t notice your haircut, when you tell her about an argument you’ve had with someone, she automatically takes his side. But of all those signs, which have become more numerous this year, her I-don’t-really-miss-you voice on the phone is the most upsetting.

So you don’t call home, to avoid feeling hurt, but the next day you have no choice, and in order to be sure you exist, you come on to a Colombian journalist who looks like Gabriela Sabatini, the tennis player. You flirt with her during the interview and ask for her e-mail address so you can send her some poems by Yehuda Amichai in Spanish translation. You send her the poems along with an invitation for dinner, but there’s still a cloud hanging over the meal: Maybe she’s an extra too? But when you kiss, the cloud disperses. She kisses hard and well, and you hail a taxi and go to your hotel. You walk past dozens of Japanese in that lobby, and you feel as if you exist. You fuck, and suddenly, you don’t care whether people abroad read your book or not. Later, she looks for her large earrings, which she took off before she undressed. She wants to go, but you touch her arm and ask her not to leave you, and all night, you sing Shlomo Artzi songs in Hebrew into her ear and fuck her. You fuck her and sing Shlomo Artzi songs. Over and over again. She’s divorced with a kid, and in the town she comes from, everyone knows everything about everyone, so she hasn’t been with a man for two years to keep them from gossiping about her in the local churrascaria, and she has a poem by Cavafy tattooed on her lower back, right near her buttocks, not “Ithaka,” something less well known. She doesn’t write fiction, only poems, and not for publication, and every time she comes, it sounds as if she’s having a serious asthma attack and might die.

She puts the large earrings on in the morning and goes off to interview other writers who have come to the festival, and you fly back to Israel.

You arrive in the middle of the night, carry your suitcase up the stairs to your apartment, and feel like Odysseus returning to Ithaca. Your wife is sleeping, buried deeply in the blanket, and you wake her with a kiss and tell her everything. There has always been complete honesty between you, and after you started becoming a professional liar, it became stronger, the need for one person to whom you can tell the truth and only the truth. But it’s not just that. You want her to truly wake up. To open her eyes.

The more you tell her, the straighter she sits up in bed. Shoves another pillow under her head. Moves from lying down to a full sitting position. Her eyes open wide. She can’t find words.

Talk to me, Diki, you plead. Say something.

She shakes her head. Slowly. Her eyes are shining.

I was lonely, you say, I was very, very lonely.

Lonely? she asks. There is disgust in her voice, but you ignore the caution sign and continue—

I wasn’t lonely just in Colombia, but before then too.

What are you saying, she says, and now her tone is blatantly sarcastic. Distant.

You try to take her hand. To keep her from dropping away from you.

Don’t touch me, she says. And says, I was lonely too. And says, But it didn’t make me sleep with someone else.

After the last sentence, she stands up, her long hair tangled, brown snakes climbing over each other, one hand clenched into a fist, the other spread like a STOP sign on the road.

She asks you to leave the house.

She doesn’t care that it’s the middle of the night. Or that the neighbors can hear you begging for your life. Since the dysthymia, it’s been impossible to live with you anyway, she says, she’s been close to the edge because of all your trips, and Colombia—Colombia is just the last straw as far as she’s concerned. She pushes you out, actually puts her hands on your chest and pushes you out, and you stand outside your front door at five thirty in the morning, one foot on the morning newspaper, the other on the doormat, and you don’t know where to go. The last time something like this happened to you, you found shelter at your grandmother’s place. But she’s dead. Until a year ago, you could drive to Ari’s, because you had an unwritten agreement that, no matter what, you would always be there for each other. But Ari is dying in the hospital now. And they’re very strict there when it comes to visiting hours. Anyway, this isn’t the right time to dump this whole story on him. So you get on your bicycle and pedal to the studio. You’re no longer a partner in it, you left a few weeks ago because you couldn’t write even a short story there, but you remember that the lock on one of the windows is broken. When you arrive, you open that window, climb inside, and go to sleep on the psychologist’s yoga mat. In your clothes. Without a blanket.

In the morning, you buy toothpaste and a toothbrush in the grocery store, brush in the sink that’s in the coffee corner and wash your feet in the same sink. While you’re lowering your feet back onto the floor, your lower back goes out again, so you hobble to the yoga mat and lie down.

At nine in the morning, there’s a knock on the door.

You’re still on the mat. And you can’t get up to open it.

You shout, “Come in!”

A messenger enters and hands you an envelope.

You sign for it, lying down, to confirm that you’ve received it.

The messenger looks at you and says, I don’t believe it!

On second glance, you recognize him. A few years ago, he was in your workshop. And he was pretty talented too. He wrote an inflammatory story about euthanasia, about someone known as “the Angel” who went from hospital to hospital in Israel between two and four in the morning to help people die. You remember that this student standing in front of you now used to go out to smoke during breaks, and at the tenth and last meeting, he raised his hand and said defiantly: We’ve talked about a lot of things in this workshop, but we’ve ignored the most important question—why write at all?

Now he asks, Does your back hurt?

Along with other things, you say.

He suggests you phone a house-call doctor to give you an epidural.

You say, I’ve taken enough painkillers.

He says, Okay, but why suffer?

You promise to consider it.

After he leaves, you open the envelope, find the forms, and read them. Several seconds pass before you understand that you’re reading divorce papers.

The director asks the cameraman to do a close-up of you.

You don’t see a director. Or a cameraman. But suspect they’re there. Part of the convoluted scheme, the big, ingenious translation scam.

You think about your kids, who still don’t know—

And start to cry.

For the camera.

And then it slowly turns into real weeping.

Does the line between truth and lies sometimes become blurred for you?

They took us for a polygraph test, all the cadets in the course for field security officers, they wanted us to learn about it up close, understand how it works. They put a small group of us, along with our commanders, into a room that contained a lot of instruments and a bearded researcher in civilian clothes. The bearded researcher asked for a volunteer to demonstrate. Without too much thought, I raised my hand. Just to stand out. He sat me on a chair and connected a few tubes and wires to my stomach and arms. Then he said, I’ll ask you several technical questions. He asked my name, my age, and my address. I answered succinctly, and then suddenly he asked me whether I’d ever used drugs. I said no. Without blinking an eye. The researcher didn’t blink either, and continued to ask me more questions that I don’t remember anymore. At the end, he thanked me, asked everyone to approach his Formica table, and explained how to read the graph. My heart was pounding and drops of sweat rolled down from the back of my neck along the length of my spine. The researcher said, Our volunteer spoke the truth all the way through, and he showed us how the various measurements the polygraph had recorded indicated that the responses of my body, even if there were big jumps in the lines, were still within the normal range. Later there were some questions, I think, and then we left the room and another group entered. We went to the canteen to wait until the bus took us back to the base. I bought a Coke, I remember, and when I opened it, the gas burst out all at once and sprayed everyone standing next to me.

For years, I hoped I’d accidentally bump into that bearded researcher again, on the train, on the street, in my family doctor’s waiting room, and ask him what really happened there: Did I manage to fool the polygraph machine? Or for some reason, did he decide to lie and save me from being thrown out of the course? But time is going by and the image of him is getting so fuzzy in my memory that sometimes I suspect I might have made up the whole story.

When you start writing, do you know how the story will end?

No, but I know how I will end. I always knew that the men in my family die young. Based on the family average, I’ll have my first heart attack in two years. It’s all about genes. But recently, since Ari got sick, it’s been having a real effect on me. The feeling I had in my twenties and thirties that nothing’s urgent has now become a feeling that everything’s urgent. Among other things, the crucial question of whether I want to spend what’s left of my life on earth writing. Whether finishing another book is the most important thing to do before the chest pains begin. Maybe, instead, I want to spend more time with Dikla and the kids? Maybe I want to go into politics? For a short time, is what I mean. Until the heart attack. Or live in Australia for a year or two? Or travel around the world looking more seriously for my childhood friend who disappeared on me after the army, and then have the attack knowing that, at least, I did what I could to find him?

I usually begin to see the end of my books—the way you see land from a sinking ship—close to the end.

I keep on swimming a while longer in the sea of infinite possibilities. Then I emerge from it in sorrow and relief.

How do you choose the names of your characters?

Ari’s mother came to take her shift at his bedside.

Usually, we exchange only a few words in Spanish and I leave. But there was something in the way she came into the room. The way she walked, heavier, wearier than usual, made me decide to stay a while longer. I didn’t have a home to go back to anyway. Just a yoga mat. So I offered her my chair and dragged one in from another room.

Ari was sleeping. From the way he was breathing, it was a deep sleep.

I brought a few empanadas, she said, taking a plastic container out of her bag.

She looked a bit like Mercedes Sosa. That thought flashed through my mind every time we met. Something Indian in her eyes. And, in fact, in her son’s eyes as well.

Gracias, I said, and took one.

Your friend, he’s very strong.

I know.

Finalmente, he will conquer this disease.

What are the chances, I didn’t say.

When he was two—she said, and stopped.

I looked at her. She was silent. I took another empanada.

He was…very naughty, your friend, she began again. We ran around the house after him to keep him from breaking things.

That sounds just like him.

When he was only a year old, he refused to take his afternoon nap. All the children in preschool went into the room with the small mattresses and went to sleep, and he would drive the teachers crazy. But they loved him. Because he did everything with that smile of his.

I can picture that.

And one evening—she said and closed the box of empanadas—I was in the kitchen. Marcello, my husband, was at work. I usually picked up the pieces of Lego after Ari finished playing, but I forgot. It just happened. I forgot. I was with him all afternoon and I was tired. He didn’t tell you this story?

No.

All of a sudden, all I heard was silence. I was in the kitchen and I heard a bad silence coming from the living room. I ran there. He’d swallowed a Lego piece.

Uh-oh.

A big piece. Four quarters.

Oh no.

I tried to get it out, I slapped his back. It didn’t come out. I called an ambulance. Meanwhile, he didn’t have any air. He couldn’t even cry because he had no air. The ambulance came fast. On the way to the hospital, he actually died. Muerte clínica. How do you say that in Hebrew? He was clinically dead? But in intensive care, they brought him back. And he was like that for a few days, between life and death.

Wow.

Then we changed his name to Ari.

What do you mean, changed it?

He never told you he had another name?

No.

Bueno, maybe he forgot.

What was his other name?

Enrico. That was the name of Marcello’s brother, he was one of the desaparecidos, the ones that the junta disappeared.

I didn’t know that—

You see, Marcello, instead of blaming me for being so stupid to leave the boy alone with the Lego, the way any man would, he blamed himself for giving him a bad name, an unlucky name.

Why unlucky?

You heard about the Madres de Plaza de Maya?

Yes, of course.

So Marcello’s mother was one of them. Her son Enrico, Marcello’s brother, went to work at the printing house one morning and never came back. She demonstrated with the mothers in the plaza every Thursday until the junta fell. But even after the junta fell, the government didn’t give any information about Enrico.

Bastards.

They say some of the disappeared were thrown out of airplanes.

Really?

And that’s why Marcello came to Israel. He didn’t want to stay there anymore.

What a story.

And the doctor in the hospital said, Your son fought like a lion, an ari. He fought like an ari for his life. So Marcello went to the Ministry of the Interior and changed his name to Ari.

And it helped?

Only God knows. And I don’t believe in God at all. But yes, Ari opened his eyes and started breathing again, and the doctor said—I will never forget his words—“The deciding factor in cases like this isn’t only the death force but also the life-force. And your son has a very strong life-force.”

That’s true.

And that’s why I tell you that he will win this time too.

I hope so.

You really didn’t know anything about this whole story?

Not a thing.

Okay, you know what they say—you learn something new every day.

That’s right.

Now you can go, you were a good friend long enough today.

Don’t be silly, Mrs.—

Carmela—

Carmela.

And take the empanadas with you. You look hungry. Everything is okay with you, corazón ?

My characters’ names are inspired by people close to me, to commemorate them or to get my juices flowing. But sometimes the fate of the character changes as the story moves forward, so there’s a burning need for a different name.

If you could invite three writers, dead or alive, for dinner, who would they be?

If we’re already talking about a dream dinner, I wouldn’t waste it on colleagues.

Writers, dead or alive, tend to be focused on themselves in a way that turns them into the most frustrating conversation partners. Furthermore, there’s always a suspicion that an intimate anecdote you relate at a dinner with writers will become raw material for any one of them. After all, most of the supposedly biographical details in this interview are supposedly taken from a conversation I had two years ago with a supposedly Scandinavian writer in a Jerusalem restaurant. Supposedly. Axel Wolff’s thrillers were phenomenally successful all over the world, but nonetheless his shoulders were stooped, his eyes dull, and his blond hair lackluster. I asked him a lot of questions in an empathetic tone, trying to understand how he could possibly be so popular everywhere and not be happy about it. That’s how I learned, among other things, that what happens in Colombia doesn’t always stay in Colombia, that a girl can break her father’s heart, and that the dysthymia makes you feel as if your body is covered by a layer of ice: Tiny fish of happiness swim beneath it, but you can’t reach them because the ice is so rock-solid that you can never break through it.

In any case, I would invite three childhood friends to that dinner. We’ve been friends since high school, but lately, we haven’t had a chance to see each other. We made too many children. We took on too many mortgages. And Ari is hospitalized in Tel Hashomer.

I would pick up Yermi and Hagai Carmeli from their mortgaged houses and we’d drive to see Ari. We would disconnect him from all the machines, dress him in his old twelfth-grade sweatshirt (because of his illness, he’s lost all the weight he gained since then), and sneak him out of oncology to the pub in Kfar Azar. Maybe it still exists, that pub, with its long wooden tables. We’d drink shandies and munch pretzels from a little glass bowl, in memory of the old days, and talk about everything but the fact that Ari might die. Hagai Carmeli would definitely start crying at some point, he always cried when he drank too much, and Yermi would constantly look at his phone and come on to the waitresses, even though at our age, it’s pathetic.

When the check came, we’d all pay our share and, as usual, realize that we’d paid too little, and everyone would have to add something. Except for Ari, whose share we’d pay.

My friends never think of me as a writer, and never will. At the most, they think it’s funny that I’ve become a person who gets interviewed.

They saw me copying during the Bible final exam; they saw me come home from basic training in the Armored Corps broken and humiliated; they saw me in love with Tali Leshem for four years, a love that everyone but me was sure would end in tears; they scraped me off the floor after she married someone else; they sat shivah for my grandmother with me and know that I’m still mourning for her; they helped me walk after my slipped disk; they helped me move apartments, even when we’d already reached the age when you hire movers to do the job; they call me at the studio now twice a day to make sure I’m still alive.

They know very well that I don’t have answers for anything. And that if I had the courage, I’d reply to all the questions people ask me in interviews the same way: I don’t know. I have no idea. Ask someone who understands.

After we managed to pay the check, we’d return Ari to the hospital, take off his sweatshirt, dress him in his open-backed gown, cover him with a blanket, and sing him songs from the first Knisiat Hasechel album until he fell asleep.

Yermi would definitely try to flirt with one of the nurses in the department.

And Hagai Carmeli and I would wait patiently until he finished. Like we had so many times in the past.

Then we’d all go out together to the huge parking lot.

On the way, Hagai Carmeli would definitely say: Maybe that was the last supper. He always had the tendency to say things there was no need to say but that sounded nice.

After a long silence that might have embarrassed other people, we would get into the car and I’d drop each of them off at his house and say, Regards to the wife, and then drive to the studio, alone, slower than usual, thinking that if Ari really dies, it’ll be a sign that an era in my life has ended. And a new, totally different era is beginning.

What is your favorite word?

Scandalmonger.

What word do you hate the most?

Terminal.

Such a two-faced word. It can be the place where you begin a journey, filled with the promise of exotic lands and new experiences.

Or it can be the end, the very end. Of everything.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?

A deejay. That’s my standard reply. It sounds good and it’s not a complete lie.

But the truth is that if I weren’t a writer who ran workshops and acted as my kids’ chauffeur, I would spend more time and energy looking for Hagai Carmeli. In high school, we were a threesome: Ari, Hagai Carmeli, and me. Ari and I trusted and supported each other totally. Hagai Carmeli, you could only trust him as far as you could throw him. But I’ve never had the kind of soul-searching talks I had with him in his basement with anyone else. Not even later, with the women I loved, did I have conversations like that. We would play chess until midnight to the sounds of Pink Floyd, and then get into our sleeping bags and talk till morning. To the sounds of Pink Floyd. There was an old grandfather clock in the living room that used to chime really loudly on the hour, and that’s how we knew time was passing. At six in the morning, light would come in through the curtainless only window in the basement, and that’s how we knew that the night had ended. When I close my eyes now, I can hear Hagai Carmeli’s voice drifting over to me in the darkness of the basement, always a bit hoarse, the slow lilt of his speech a soft buffer against the very sharp things he sometimes said. “Tell me, man, don’t you feel…a little stupid when we sing ‘Wish You Were Here’? Everyone we know is pretty much here, right? So who’s left to miss?”

An intimate conversation with someone you’re close to is one of the greatest pleasures life has to offer. But for such a conversation to take place, you need a partner who knows how to listen and also how to confess. How to seek the truth without being hurtful. Unpredictable but not threatening. And of course, you need time. So that both sides can dig deep. And you need a place where all that can happen. In short, we’re talking about a miracle that takes place only rarely. And that miracle happened to me with Hagai Carmeli over and over again—before he disappeared.

It’s tempting to blame the army for the way his life got turned around. It adds an ideological layer to the story. And yes, the army really did screw him up. A series of unfortunate incidents possibly caused by his big mouth and his slowness, but also by the stupidity of the system, led to the most intelligent person I know ending up as a base maintenance worker. He transported gravel from one place to another in a wheelbarrow, swept sidewalks with a witch’s broom, and, as he walked the paths of the base, contemplated the unbearable heaviness of being. I used to visit him on the Saturdays he was confined to base for one reason or another, and we would sit in the sentry booth all night—his cocked weapon hanging across his short body, his curly red hair sprouting from under his helmet—and listen to Pink Floyd, cooking up schemes to help him transfer to another platoon, to a job that would truly enable him to contribute. Occasionally, we would go out for a slow walk, a very slow walk, around the booth so he wouldn’t fall asleep, and when he fell asleep anyway, I kept watch so his commander wouldn’t surprise us, ready to elbow him in the ribs to wake him, listening to the random words he muttered in his sleep, “No,” “Normandy,” “Twenty-two,” trying in vain to squeeze some meaning out of them.

He was finally discharged due to psychological problems.

But it wasn’t just the army that unhinged him. There was also that business about his little sister Danya. They were too close, almost joined at the hip. He never said it in so many words, but apparently, when they were teenagers, that closeness spilled over into forbidden territory. Or maybe it was just in his head, maybe he just fantasized a spill over, which in itself was forbidden. I’m not sure. That was the only subject he was silent about in our conversations. But I remember something he once said to me, in the basement (he spoke the kind of language that wasn’t ashamed to be beautiful, which also got him into trouble in the army), “I need to get as far away from her as possible. There are people who simply weren’t meant to live together in the same house.”

In the end, he left the country. Not because of her. And not because of the army. He got involved with the wrong people. After his early discharge, he became obsessed with making as much money as he could. He opened a café and closed it. He imported and exported. He bought and sold. When I asked what, he said, “You’re better off not knowing.”

With me, he only talked about what he would do with the money, a different grandiose plan every time: establish an NGO that would help soldiers in emotional distress, establish a museum of the Hebrew language, buy all the land adjoining Ga’ash Beach so no one could ever build there.

Then one night, when he was twenty-five, he pulled a vanishing act. It seems that he owed a lot of money to a lot of people and loan-shark thugs came by his apartment twice and broke windows.

He didn’t get in touch with me before he disappeared. Or after. I thought it was his way of protecting himself and was sure he’d come back. I give him a year, two at most, I told Ari. But three years later, there was still no sign of him on the horizon. And what was more upsetting: There was no sign of life. And even more upsetting: I was the only one who cared.

His father had died in the Yom Kippur War—Hagai was two then—and his mother developed Alzheimer’s at a relatively young age, and when I called her, she didn’t even remember who Hagai was.

So I called Danya. His sister.

A year earlier, by chance, I was sitting in a café where she was waitressing, and now I went back to that café. She was still working there, and she dashed around the tables with amazing speed. So different from the pensive way her brother ambled through life. When I told her I wanted to speak to her, she said, “Not now,” and wrote her number on a piece of paper.

She answered after one ring.

I said: It makes no sense that in the twenty-first century, a person can fade away without leaving a trace. I suggested we raise some money and form a search party. Or that we hire the services of a well-known missing persons site.

You can’t laugh in someone’s face over the phone, but that was my feeling, Danya laughed in my face. A search party? To look for Hagai? First of all, if he doesn’t want to be found, you won’t find him. Believe me. My résumé includes hundreds of hours of playing hide-and-seek with him in the backyard. Besides, exactly who would you ask to contribute? All the people he owes money to? Do you know that your friend went through all the money I saved up in a year of waitressing? He asked me to lend him money right before he disappeared. Said he’d pay back everything in a week. You think you know him? You don’t know a thing about Hagai.

But I miss him, our conversations, finally I have someone to think about when I hear “Wish You Were Here”—I wanted to tell her, but didn’t. Maybe because it suddenly occurred to me that the bitterness in her voice had something to do with what had spilled over between them.

Ari didn’t think it was such a great idea either. You know what I think of Hagai, he said. A brilliant guy, but bottom line, the only thing he cares about is himself. You think he’d organize a search party for you if you disappeared?

And so it happened that the search party formed to find Hagai Carmeli consisted of only one person. Me.

I developed a ritual I follow on every trip I take. Right after checking in at the hotel, I drop my luggage in the room and check the schedule left for me on the desk to make sure there’s no interview planned for the next hour or two. I’m considered a minor, if not unsuccessful, writer in most of the countries I visit, that’s the bitter truth, but it has its advantages—the schedule they leave for me on the desk has enough holes in it to be insulting, so I can leave immediately to wander around the city. Without a map.

Those rambles have two purposes: The obvious one—to get lost. And the hidden one—to find Hagai Carmeli.

Two years ago, in Istanbul, I momentarily thought I’d succeeded.

There are chestnut vendors on the streets.

And one of them—it’s hard to explain.

Something in the way he moved his hands. His protruding elbows.

I moved closer to him.

I listened to him speaking with a customer. The voice—slightly hoarse. The cadence—slow. He could have dyed his red hair black. He could have surgically altered his face. That’s what you do when you want to disappear.

I went over to him and asked for some chestnuts. I tried to catch his eye. But he treated me as if I were just another customer. Picked up a handful of chestnuts with an iron scoop, dropped them in a brown bag, and turned to the next person in line.

I decided to take a chance. I walked about ten meters, leaned on the fence of Gezi Park and shouted: Hagai!

It’s instinctive to respond when your name is called.

I didn’t think he would look at me, but I studied his face for the slightest movement. The smallest twitch.

Nada.

A few birds, frightened by my shout, flew into the park, and the chestnut vendor continued serving his customers.

But the next morning, he wasn’t there. I told the story to my hosts from the publishing company, who explained to me that all of Istanbul knows that chestnut vendors are actually undercover agents for Erdoğan. They have been keeping an eye on the goings-on in Gezi Park since the attempted coup five years ago. That’s why they change their posts so frequently.

That explanation didn’t convince me and I kept searching for him in Istanbul. And, in fact, in every place I’ve been to during the last few years.

When I meet with people, during newspaper interviews, on the subway, in taxis, on the streets—I never stop searching for Hagai Carmeli.

In an act of desperation, I made him a character in one of my books. Under another name, of course. He also disappears in the book, and there are all sorts of rumors about him, but in the end, at the moment of truth, he returns. I’d hoped he would somehow get ahold of the book. I pictured him arriving at a meeting with readers—at first I wouldn’t notice him because he’s short and hidden by the crowd. Only later would his red hair pop up, and at the end of the meeting, he would wait patiently for the last person who approached to ask questions to leave, and only then would he come up to me, my book in his hand, and smile that mini-malistic smile of his at me.

Even in my answers to these questions—which I promised myself would be totally honest and open—I mentioned him as a genuine friend who played an active part in my life and included him in the last supper with Ari (it’s so easy to learn what didn’t happen in a writer’s life from the books he wrote, but most readers still insist on doing the opposite).

I also returned Yermi from the abyss of oblivion to that supper, even though I have no idea what’s happening with him today. In fact, even though I’ve been writing about circles of friends for years and lecture about friendship as a major value of Israeli society—

I’ve had only three good friends.

Only one is left.

And soon, maybe he…

Then what?

Where will I take my secrets? Who will I tell that I haven’t been sleeping at home for two weeks now and that when Dikla and I talk on the phone about which of us will go to the parent-teacher meeting and who will take care of the car insurance, her voice is colder than Jerusalem in winter? Who will I be my real self with? Can a person live without any friends at all?

How do you manage to deal with the loneliness that’s part of writing?

I don’t.

Who is your first reader?

I circle around Dikla on the days she’s reading my manuscript, waiting for her to say something. Waiting for her to fall asleep so I can see how much she’s read. And if she wrote any comments. Bottom line, I can’t do anything without thinking about what she will say.

The most difficult time was during my exile to the studio. She didn’t really send a messenger with divorce papers for me there after I returned from Colombia. She’s not that kind of person. She just asked me not to come home for a few days, or weeks, it was hard for her to know. She needed time to digest it all and decide what she would do. She also asked me not to call. So she wouldn’t have to not answer.

That was a dark time. I could barely move from the yoga mat because of my back pain.

I canceled all my writing workshops. And all my meetings. I didn’t tell anyone, at first. She asked me not to. And I didn’t know what to tell them. The situation was unclear.

The tone of her voice in our last conversation led me to believe that there was a real possibility I might lose her.

On our fifth date, she said that since she read The World According to Garp, she’d been dreaming of marrying a writer. That was the most personal thing she’d said to me until that moment. Most of the time she was silent, listening, and every now and then, she offered mature, astute opinions on a variety of social issues. It seemed to me that she was hiding a wound under all those adamant opinions. She majored in philosophy and business administration, an unusual combination, and she’d come back from London a few months before we met. She’d gone there on a trip, met a rich twenty-year-old Brit, and moved in with him. A year later, they had a bad breakup. She didn’t want to tell me any more than that. But whenever she mentioned him, there was more anger than hurt in her eyes. Maybe that’s why she’s so cautious with me, I thought, but never dared to ask. She wore tailored clothes. Restrained. Not Israeli. Not student-ish. She was my height without heels, and taller than me with them. It lent her an aristocratic look. Distant. Sufficient unto herself. But the way she moved her hands was remarkably impassioned and sensual. She had long, thin arms, and her hands opened so slowly that they seemed to be caressing, inviting.

It was like that for almost a month. Her body said, Don’t you dare come close to me, but her hands said, Come here now. I didn’t know what to do with that double message, and more than anything, I didn’t want to make a mistake, because from the first moment Ari and Meital introduced us at that club in Kibbutz Cabri, I’d had a sense of destiny. As if something very important was about to be decided. Or, in fact, had already been decided.

We went out four times, and at the end of each date, I didn’t know if there would be another one.

That’s how bad I was at reading her.

Then I told her that I write. Sometimes.

And she said those words, that she had always dreamed of marrying a writer, adding a flirtatious smile, the first flirtatious smile. She leaned slightly toward me, revealing her spectacular collarbone.

After we slept together, we lay beside each other in bed.

I remember that I said: Wow

And that she said: Wow.

I remember that I stroked her and said: You have a dancer’s body.

The truth is, she said, that I danced in the Ma’alot Hora group. And she giggled. They thought I’d turn out to be something.

And…you didn’t? I asked gently.

I didn’t pass the academy tests, she said. Truthfully, it was pretty humiliating.

I waited silently for the story, which did not come.

I still didn’t know that that’s what I’d always get, it was all her pride would allow: quick glances into the wounded area. And there would be something terribly frustrating and, at the same time, seductive about that.

I was twenty-four that night, an age when it’s still possible to have new dreams.

I can’t say that I became a writer to win Dikla’s heart, but I can assume that with another, less stimulating woman, I wouldn’t be writing.

When I left on a trek to South America a few months after we met, she was in the middle of the academic year, and she wasn’t the type to change plans for anyone.

One of us suggested that maybe we should see other people while I was away.

The same one, waiting in Amsterdam for his connecting flight, changed a bill for some coins to drop into the pay phone, and said, I take it back, I don’t want to lose you, you’re the love of my life, it doesn’t matter how long this trip takes, I’m yours. Yours alone.

I kept my word.

I wrote her long letters while I was away. Very long. Dozens of crowded pages. There were days when that was all I did: write to her. Ari showed exemplary patience. I remember a particular roof in a town called Tumbes in Peru that had straw chairs and a footstool on it, along with an ugly view of buildings. I didn’t come down from that roof for two days, and every time Ari came up to ask what was going on with me and when were we finally going to move on to another place, I said, Just a sec, bro, I’m in the middle of a letter.

In fact, everything I’ve written since then, eight books, is one very long letter addressed to her.

I never let anyone else get as close to me as she did. Her name alone engulfed me with softness.

I can’t fall asleep without her, wake up without her, fall without her, find my way in the hall of mirrors without her.

In the end, I’ll probably show her this interview too.

She called me after I’d been sleeping in the studio for two weeks.

Said the kids missed me.

That she doesn’t know what to tell them.

That she’s sick and tired of having to take care of everything herself.

I said, Does that mean I can come back?

Yes, she replied, but—

I said, I’d like to remind you that all the men in my family die young.

And she didn’t play her part and laugh.

We haven’t slept together since then. After the kids fall asleep, I go to the couch in the living room, and before they wake up, I fold the sheet and blanket, drink a cup of Turkish coffee, and make their sandwiches: cream cheese for Yanai, cream cheese and olives for Noam. I also make a third sandwich, with cream cheese, olives, and cherry tomatoes—for Shira. Then I remember that she doesn’t live at home anymore. So I eat it myself.

Yesterday, I asked Dikla if she would mind reading something new I was working on. Of course, I waited for the right moment. I waited for her to come back from her evening run. Ten kilometers. I waited for her to finish showering. Shampoo, conditioner, body lotion. I waited for her to put on the sweat suit she wears at home and the thick woolen socks she bought in London when she was there with that twenty-something guy. I waited for her to brew her homeopathic tea, spread her long legs on the couch and sip it. I waited for her cheeks to redden from the heat of the tea and her eyes to become shiny, as if she were crying.

Then I asked her.

She said she didn’t have time for it. She’s in the middle of another book, a thriller, by that Scandinavian writer, Wolff? You know, the one who looks like a Viking?

I persisted. I asked again.

She shook her head and said that, the Viking aside, it was just too soon for her to read something of mine. That until now, she could always separate the story from the writer, my fantasies from the reality of our life, but she wasn’t sure she could do that now.

A wave of coldness flooded my body. Like the one I’d felt at the edge of the abyss on Death Road in Bolivia.

I went into the kitchen to load the dishwasher and said to myself, It won’t be easy, but that’s my mission: to do everything to make her believe once again that everything except her is and always will be only a story.

What kind of music do you listen to?

Damn that song. Even when our love was very much alive, there was something stressful about listening to it on the radio when we were driving together. Even when the drive could end in our turning onto a dirt road to undress each other, right then, because we couldn’t wait—those lyrics sounded like an ominous prophecy that would come true in the end, because even we, whether we wanted to or not, would follow the herd of mumbling souls—

Now, a week after returning home from my exile in the studio, we’re driving to the wedding of one of her employees. And there’s a traffic jam on the highway.

We’ll be late, Dikla thinks.

Of course, I think. It took you so long to get ready.

I’m getting old, it takes time to camouflage it, Dikla thinks.

You just get more attractive with the years, I think.

Colombia, she thinks.

Not a word is spoken.

And then that song that Ariel Horowitz wrote for his wife, Tamar Giladi (how does a woman feel when a man writes a song for her called “Love Is Dead”?)—

And both of us, at the same moment, reach for the dial to change the station.

All of your books are written in the same style. Have you ever thought of writing something completely different? Maybe science fiction? Fantasy?

So let’s say I wrote something about a different planet. And let’s say that planet had two suns. And three moons, one of which was the planet’s Siberia, where people were sent for punishment. And let’s say that every new person you met on that new planet wasn’t really new to you, because a few seconds before the encounter, all the intimate information the Web had collected on him was transmitted into your brain. And let’s say there was an underground of people who wanted to disconnect from the Web so they wouldn’t know everything. People who believed that life without secrets was not worth living. And let’s say that the authorities on the planet persecuted those people in the underground. Or the idea of democracy didn’t yet exist, and the council of representatives of various giant Web corporations ran things. And let’s say that the leader of the underground was a woman with a dark secret in her past. Really dark. Which was revealed to every new person who met her. And let’s say she was sick of it, which is why she had the need to conceal, to leave the past behind and turn over a new leaf. And let’s say she knew a hacker named Tristan Carmeli, who fell in love with her despite her dark secret, or maybe because of it. And Tristan Carmeli managed to find a way to hide her and all the underground people somewhere inside the Web. Not outside the Web—because that’s where the authorities would search for them—but inside it. Very deep inside it. Intra-Web. Like an air bubble in bread. And let’s say that Tristan Carmeli lived deep inside that intra-Web hiding place and wrote poems about the world that he and the other underground people would have liked to live in. And let’s say that his poems had to be short, shorter than haiku, so he could conceal them in code. And let’s say that one of the poems was:

I will wait here

Until the first leaf

Falls

And the other poem was:

Once

To travel

Without destination

And let’s say that, in the end, he couldn’t control himself and wrote a longer poem, maybe even a story, to the leader of the underground, confessing that he thought her dark secret, the secret she tried so hard to hide from the world, was beautiful. And let’s say that because of that overlong poem, the underground was exposed and all its members received the harshest punishment of all: a full Wikipedia entry loaded with links. And banishment to the third, Siberian moon. And let’s say there was an iRobot with a sense of humor in the story. And a forest where the trees could run. And cars that turned into jet fighters with the click of a button. And an app that enabled you to see the dream you had last night, along with possible interpretations, on your phone display.

What difference does it make.

In any case, it would turn out that once again, I wrote about an impossible love.

Have you written any stories you would never publish?

MAYAN’S PICTURE

So listen. I lost your picture when we moved. And I really tried to make sure nothing happened to it. I put it into a plastic sleeve, an entire plastic sleeve for one small picture. I have no idea how it happened. I still hope I’ll find it, there are two or three cartons we haven’t had time to unpack yet, but chances are I won’t. And it’s breaking my heart, you know? I kept it with me all the time, I want you to know that. Since your mother came over and handed it to me after the lecture in Ganei Tikva and told me that they found a book in your backpack, which returned on the plane along with you.

Look, this is Mayan, she said, pointing to you in the picture.

Even before she pointed, I knew it was you. Something in your expression. If I had been your age and traveled to South America and we met in some ramshackle hostel for trekkers—I would have fallen in love with you, Mayan. I have no doubt at all. I’m a powder keg of emotion just waiting for a match, and the way you’re standing on the sand, your right foot slightly forward, your left hand on your waist—even though it’s a still, I can guess how you walk, Mayan. Your steps are like a dance, and you tilt your head a bit to the right when you approach people, right?

I kept the picture in my hand even after the taxi picked me up and looked at it for a long time: four girls in bathing suits. One of them, not you, was holding a surfboard. I liked the picture because, contrary to what I would expect from a trek picture, there was no pretense in it. It looked as if someone sneaked up on you and took your picture before any of you were ready. None of the girls but you looks especially happy. To be honest, you all look beat. People don’t talk about it when they come back, but wandering is exhausting, and there are so many moments of extreme loneliness on a trek, aren’t there?

At home, I propped your picture up against the books on the shelf in my den. It was so small that it fell a few times before I understood how to position it on Yehuda Amichai’s Achziv, Caesarea and One Love —do you know it?—which jutted out a bit from the other books. But even then, I would occasionally find that, when I was out, a gust of wind had blown the picture onto the floor. I would pick it up and put it back on Amichai. Gently.

It was obvious to me that people who entered the room would have something to say about that picture. A man who keeps a picture of four girls in bikinis in his den—how could they not make remarks and give me a conspiratorial pat on the back. But I never gave them an explanation. I never told anyone the story behind that picture. Even a story monger like me has his red lines. They can all go fuck themselves, I thought, it’s something that has to stay between you and me.

What I did do sometimes—can I admit it?—was look at you before I started to write. It helped light a fire under me and made me remember that there was someone on the other side.

To be honest, it’s become a ritual lately, standing in front of your picture before I start to write. Like a moment of silence on Memorial Day, except without the siren. (Tell me, Mayan, did you raise your head and look at other people’s bowed heads during the moment of silence at school? I suspect you did. In the picture, too, you’re standing slightly apart from your friends, not completely a part of the group, sort of watching from the sidelines.)

In any case, when we moved, your picture disappeared. As if there were a hidden abyss between the apartments into which only the most important things dropped. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to tell you in this letter, Mayan. That you have become someone important in my life. Without ever having met. Without ever having spoken. Without ever having written to each other. Somehow, it happened. I’ve become attached to you. I began wondering what you would say about certain stories. Then I began consulting with you before making decisions about things that had nothing to do with my stories. One look into your green eyes, and suddenly it became absolutely clear to me what I should do. I told you—not out loud, I’m not crazy, at least I wasn’t until recently—about things that were happening in my life. About becoming my own jailer. About the fact that I dream about tunnels. About how it feels to be unloved in your own home. And about how your picture got lost—I really hope it hasn’t, and as soon I finish this letter, I’ll have to unpack those three cartons, and I pray I’ll find it there, but if the picture is really lost, I can’t see how I can go on from here. I mean, first of all, I can’t see how I can continue to write. If I don’t write, I have nowhere to put my memories, and that’s dangerous. I have a problem. I don’t forget anything. My forgetting mechanism is completely screwed up. All the partings, the deaths, the unexploited opportunities. They are all trapped in my body, and writing is the only way to release them. Like a passenger arriving at the check-in counter only to find that his suitcase weighs too much—I write because if I don’t occasionally unburden myself of the weight of some of those memories, I won’t be able to breathe. No air will enter my body. Or leave it.

I’m not exaggerating. It’s a matter of life and death for me. It always has been.

Sometimes I imagine your last trip, from La Paz to Coroico. If I close my eyes and really concentrate, it’s as if I’m with you and your friends in the van. I’m sitting beside you. Fear is making you sweat, and I smell the sweet scent. You’re wearing fisherman’s pants tied with a string, and your legs are pressed against each other. Our knees are almost touching. And on the turns, they do touch. Did you know that I once traveled on that hellish road too? When your mother came over to me with the picture after my lecture in Ganei Tikva, I didn’t tell her. I didn’t want to hurt her with the fact that I survived. But I’d also been warned about that road, twenty years before you were, and I didn’t pay any attention either. When you’re twenty-something, warnings are like flies you shoo away with your hand. But I remember that during the first hour of the ride, I realized I was in real danger. The lane was terrifyingly narrow and three days of constant rain had softened the shoulders, turning them into mud. Every time a van came from the opposite direction, our driver executed some frightening and risky maneuvers in reverse: In order to let the other van pass us, he had to pull back so that the rear end of our van was almost hanging over the ravine, but not completely, because then the center of gravity might move too far back.

At some point I closed my eyes. I couldn’t keep looking into the chasm that opened beneath us without getting seriously dizzy. Did you close your eyes too? Or maybe you opened them when the drop began? Whenever I picture that precise moment of your final trek, I suddenly feel a powerful desire—idiotic but powerful—to save you. After all, I took a medic’s course in the army. If I had reached you in time, and not twenty-four hours later, like those useless Bolivians, maybe I could have saved you. I don’t know whether you had a normal life, and even if you did, after a five-hundred-meter drop in a van that turned over at least six times before it stopped at the bottom of the wadi—but maybe, who knows, who can know…

I kept my eyes closed almost all the way to Coroico, opening them only when there were potholes and the van juddered.

The two Germans who were with me didn’t speak, either. I remember that one of them had a book. He held it open as if he were calm enough to read, but he didn’t turn a page for a long time.

Suddenly it turned very cold.

Each of us huddled into his poncho.

The German with the book closed it and pushed it under his thigh.

A list of things I still hadn’t done passed through my mind: becoming a father, publishing a book, learning to scuba dive. Silently, I recited the haftora from my bar mitzvah from beginning to end three times. I shoved my hands under my thighs to keep them from shaking. I wanted so much to live then. I mean—

I think I already knew then that life brings pain. Of course I knew. But the proportions were different: There were more desires. The pain was duller.

Over this past year, because of the dysthymia, I sometimes wake up in the morning with a pain in my other heart, not the one that pumps blood but the one behind it that feels fear and anxiety, and the pain is so strong that I have to ask the question, THE question—

But until now, I always had a clear answer.

I would go over to your picture.

There’s a hint of a smile in the corner of your mouth. Not an actual smile. Definitely not laughter. More an inclination of the mouth that hints at an inclination of the soul toward goodness.

Do you understand? This entire year—maybe it’s even longer? It’s hard to know exactly when the deterioration began, or why, maybe Ari’s illness was the trigger, or Shira’s departure for Sde Boker. In any case, this last year I’ve been a musician who’s lost the rhythm of the piece he’s playing, in the middle of a performance, in front of hundreds of people. All the other musicians are waiting for him to get back in step. The audience is already whispering. But he can’t manage to do it. Every time I looked at your smile this last year, it reminded me that I haven’t always been like this. Which means that maybe this dysthymia thing is just a tunnel I have to pass through. Then I’ll reach the light.

I still have three cartons to unpack. We put them in my den temporarily, and they’ve been here, piled one on the other like blocks in a kindergarten. I’ve postponed opening them for a few days already, each time with a different excuse.

Actually, this whole letter is an attempt to postpone opening them for another few hours. To leave us a chance, even a small one.

Were you ever in therapy?

I decided to surprise Dikla at the Watsu pool. Once every two weeks, she took off early from work, went there to do Watsu, aquatic shiatsu, and came home a different person. More radiant.

I thought, We’ll go out to eat after her treatment. It could be a propitious time.

I arrived a few minutes before two thirty. There’s a kind of waiting space there with cushions and poufs. And a pleasant breeze. A thin partition separated it from the pool.

At first, music came from the direction of the pool. Just music. And then the music stopped and I heard Dikla say something. Her therapist, Gaia, replied. Then there was the kind of trickling sound of someone coming out of the water. Then some more trickling, similar but different. Now they were both standing close to the partition and I heard Dikla say, “In any case, before the bat mitzvah, I don’t plan to make any deci—”

In the middle of the word, they moved the partition and came out together.

Dikla is tall and narrow-shouldered. Gaia is short and broad-shouldered.

A thought ran through my mind: I wonder how they look when they’re in the water.

Dikla completed the word—“sion”—before she realized it was me, sitting on the pouf. She stopped talking.

In the tenth of a second it took for her to dredge up a reasonable response to my being there, I understood that she wasn’t happy to see me and they had apparently been talking about me. About us.

Hi, I said.

Hi, Dikla said and kissed me on the cheek. Not on the mouth.

I have a free hour, I said. I thought we could go to Goferman’s for something to eat.

They’ve closed, Gaia said.

And I have to drive Gaia home, Dikla said.

Right, I said, and casually took a step back.

But we can have coffee at Aroma, near the house, Dikla said.

Okay, I said, see you there. Then I said to Gaia, I want you to know that I’m really jealous of Dikla. The way she looks when she comes home from here makes me think that Watsu therapy is just what I need.

You’re always welcome, Gaia said, her tone reserved.

We didn’t have coffee at Aroma. Dikla got stuck in traffic on the way back from Gaia’s and then it was time to pick up Yanai from day care.

But I did go for Watsu therapy. A week later. Not at the same pool Dikla goes to, so as to not invade her territory (that’s how I felt, like an unwanted invader).

On the way to Safed to give a lecture, I stopped at Amuka. There’s a therapeutic pool there too. From the outside, it looks like a greenhouse, and inside—water and a wooden deck, a small dressing room, and robes for men.

I don’t remember the name of the therapist who greeted me. Fifty-something, long hair gathered into a ponytail with a rubber band, soft eyes.

The water was hot, but not too hot.

I leaned on the rim of the pool and asked her, How exactly does this work?

You’ll see in a minute, the therapist said with a smile, and asked, How are you?

How am I?

Yes, how are you?

So many people have asked me how I am these last few weeks, I thought, but no one asked like that. With simple curiosity. Not prying. In a way that required an honest answer.

I hurt, I said.

Where?

In my posterior heart.

Your posterior heart?

Not the one that pumps blood, the one that’s afraid of losing people.

Where exactly is it located, this posterior heart.

In my back, between my shoulders. That’s where I feel it.

Is there someone in particular that you…are afraid of losing?

The truth is that I’m afraid of losing a few…someones.

Okay, she said, and instead of asking me about my childhood and my relationship with my parents, she leaned forward and put floaties around my ankles, took hold of my fingers, and in a slow, continuous movement, cradled me into her body and began to slide me through the water. Gently, at first, like a paper boat, and then slightly faster. I closed my eyes, but a series of practical concerns kept me from abandoning myself to it: I hadn’t asked her how long the session lasted. I still had to drive to Safed, a minimum of twenty minutes away. Do they accept credit cards? And if not, where the hell would I find an ATM in this out-of-the-way place?

Slowly, the water separated me from my thoughts. Of all the images that came into my mind during that session in Amuka, I remember only two—

The first very brief, really only a flash—Shira walking into the boarding school at Sde Boker, her curls bouncing on her back, dragging two suitcases, one in each hand, as I wondered whether she would turn around for a last look.

The second slightly longer—Dikla and I cutting and running out of the Arad music festival because it was too crowded for her and going down to the Dead Sea. We found an unpopulated beach and went into the water. Before that, I had never been able to float in the Dead Sea. I always thought it was something that happened to other people. But that evening, Dikla and I found a position: her legs on my shoulders, my legs on her shoulders. We held hands and floated, looking at each other and talking. Balance was very precarious. One wrong movement, one wrong word, and we both might lose our equilibrium.

Other images followed. I might have fallen asleep for a few minutes. At some point, the therapist massaged a few shiatsu pressure points between my shoulders, where my posterior heart is, then hummed a song I didn’t try to identify.

In talk therapy, you can tell the session is about to end when your therapist takes a quick glance at his watch or when he begins to prepare you verbally for the separation.

In Watsu, it’s more like music: Something in the melody of the gliding signaled me.

The therapist returned me to the edge of the pool, still grasping my fingers, and then released them, one by one, until my hand was left floating on the water.

I dove. Resurfaced. Opened my eyes and said, Thank you.

You’re welcome, she said, and asked, What sign are you?

Pisces.

I could tell, she said, adding, you’re welcome to shower. I have to get moving, but I’ll leave you some tea and dates on the table.

I drank the tea and thought, Body therapy works much better for me than talk therapy. The body can’t lie.

After the lecture in Safed, I drove to Haifa, to that store in Hadar, and found a rare David Bowie CD for Dikla. It had only Bowie’s voice singing the whole Ziggy Stardust album a capella, clean, exposed, no embellishment, no arrangement. I put it on the passenger seat. I touched the bag occasionally, thinking that Noam’s bat mitzvah was still a few months away and maybe all was not lost.

What question that you have never been asked would you like to be asked?

What do you think about when a German actor stands on a stage in Munich and reads a forty-minute passage from one of your books? No, really. You pretend you’re listening to him. You have to pretend. There are people in the audience. Not many, but there they are. Well-dressed. The Holocaust is always in the background of every event in Germany, lending it an air of gravity. And yes, for the first minute, you’re still looking for Hagai Carmeli in the sparse audience, but then you have another thirty-nine minutes, and you can’t really spend thirty-nine minutes listening to a text you don’t understand a word of. So where do your thoughts wander? How many of them are devoted to Ari, who is dying the hospital? How many to your wife, who continues to be cold and distant? How many to women who aren’t your wife? How many to your daughter, who left for boarding school and doesn’t want to speak to you? How many to guessing which of the silver-haired people in the hall were in the SS? How many to what the exchange rate of the euro is? And could it be that right then, as your thoughts wander freely and your body is relaxed, free of any obligation, the seed of your next book is born?

Could you write in a language that isn’t Hebrew?

No way.

In your opinion, what role should the Jews of the Diaspora play in relation to Israel?

They should come to meetings with Israeli writers.

Because no one else does anymore.

Except for BDS members, who stand up and leave the hall together, in open protest, as soon as you begin to speak, leaving you alone with the presenter and the interpreter. And the two girls from the publishing house who are constantly checking messages on their cell phones.

Obviously, former Israelis come to hear your lectures abroad. How do those encounters make you feel?

She comes into the hall a bit late. She was always a bit late for our dates. I would wait for her on the bench in the park near her parents’ house on Harufeh Street and build up my expectations. I recognize her immediately, even though it’s been nine years since I saw her last, during Book Week, when the event still took place in Yarkon Park. We used to meet there, as if by accident; she worked for Steimatzky, the book distributor, and I was autographing books at a stand, knowing that at some point, she’d come to see me, and, sitting so close to each other that our chairs almost touched, we’d talk. Rather, she would talk, and I would mainly listen. As usual. And when I caught a whiff of the scent of her hair, something inside me was aroused. An echo of something. After we’d exchanged kisses on the cheek and she’d left, people, I mean men, would come up to me and ask about that woman I’d sat with for so long. I’d answer proudly, My first girlfriend, sometimes adding: For four years, from the middle of my senior year in high school until I was discharged from the army.

During one of those Book Week conversations, she told me that she was getting married. Even though I didn’t want to marry her, I was jealous. She had a beautiful coffee-colored birthmark to the left of her navel, and I loved to linger there, my lips on it, until moving farther down. And she had this gesture—running her fingers under her curls and shifting them, all at once, from left to right. And she played the flute very well, but not well enough for the army orchestra. She loved to tease me, didn’t get along with my mother, and unintentionally—sometimes intentionally—insulted the few girlfriends she had in high school by making tactless remarks. She sent me perfumed letters when I was in basic training and then the officer training course, and traveled from Haifa all the way south to Mitzpe Ramon on the Saturdays I stayed on the base, just to sleep with me and then go back. She was discharged a year before me, and went to work as a security checker at the airport. She sprayed a bit of perfume on herself at four in the morning, when she heard the short beep of the cab that had come to pick her up for work. But she quit that job after two months because she didn’t get along with the shift manager. She had to earn a living doing something, so she babysat for, among others, my older sister. Until the incident.

She didn’t want to go to the annual Arad music festival with me, a week after the incident, and didn’t answer when I asked if that was the reason. When I came back from Arad, she said hi, without moving her eyes from the TV screen. For weeks, she didn’t want to sleep with me, or she slept with me without any desire and without coming. She started going out to salsa nights without me, and came home later and later, her clothes smelling of cigarettes. She didn’t try to stop me when I began putting my clothes into large garbage bags, and she didn’t say: Don’t go, I love you. She didn’t come to my grandmother’s house in Holon to ask me to come back, and didn’t send messages through mutual friends, and when I went to the apartment to collect the few things I’d left behind, she made sure not to be there.

She canceled her wedding a week before the date. Mutual acquaintances who had received invitations told me. I wasn’t surprised. It was just like her. Later, I heard from those acquaintances that she met someone else, a guy who came in second in a national high-jump competition, married him a month later, and moved with him to the United States, to a town in the Midwest. Because of some job offer he’d received. Or a sports grant.

The Midwest is far away and not on the way to anywhere. Our mutual acquaintances broke off contact with her and I didn’t hear any gossip about her for years. I had almost completely stopped having dreams of running hand in hand with her, escaping from something, and it had been a long time since I took her letters out of the shoe box I kept them in to check whether they still gave off the scent of her perfume.

And now here she is. In the third row on the right. The lecture I prepared is over, and now people are asking questions, too many questions, and I answer, Yes, Hebrew is assimilated by other languages, but is that necessarily a bad thing? And someone asks, Would you be a writer if you weren’t born in Israel? I offer my ready answer, constantly stealing glances at her, trying to figure out how I can skip out on the kosher dinner, another kosher dinner, that the Jewish community organized for after the event—

In the end, I tell the organizers the truth. Listen, I see a childhood friend here, and this is the last night, we won’t have another chance to talk, I hope it’s all right with you—

Look, they say, we’ve already reserved the restaurant—

She’s waiting on the side, as if embarrassed, but not really, biting the nail on her pinkie, a gesture I know very well, and crossing one leg over the other as she stands there, another gesture I know very well.

I don’t say anything, don’t back down, I know for certain that what I’m doing is not polite, but it’s obvious to me that I’m doing the right thing.

They look at me, look at her, and something apparently becomes clear to them, because they retreat, only reminding me that they will pick me up at seven tomorrow morning to take me to the airport.

We go outside and begin walking the downtown streets. I’m a bit cold, but she seems to be okay, so I don’t say anything about it. We walk in our regular positions, she on the left, I on the right, and I wonder if she notices this as well. She’s wearing tight jeans and a button-down denim shirt, and I remember the way her army shirt was tucked into her uniform pants, which were always a few sizes too big for her. I remember that, although she was a natural chatterbox, she always needed someone else to begin the conversation.

You look great, I say.

How can you tell? she teased me. It’s dark!

No, really, I say, smiling.

You, on the other hand, look older, she says. Then she caresses the back of my neck briefly—or simply lets her hand linger on it, depending on how you interpret it—then adds, What’s with all those white hairs?

I’m silent, admitting my guilt.

And since when did you become such a big lecturer? she adds. You used to be so shy.

Inside, I’m still shy.

You hide it very well.

Did you enjoy the lecture?

It was terrific, even though…

Even though what?

Never mind, we haven’t seen each other for nine years, and I’m already putting you down…

You started already, so go on—

You…fake it. You’re not really there. It feels like you’re giving a speech. Even the jokes you tell—it’s like you know they’ll work because they did in the past.

I guess you’re right.

But people enjoyed it, don’t worry. I’m the only one who noticed that you weren’t totally there.

I wasn’t there at all because of you, funny girl. The minute you came in, all I wanted was for the lecture to end, I think, but don’t say.

We reach the small lake—really just a puddle—in the middle of the little park. We sit down on a bench, which is slightly damp. The water in the puddle glistens like eyes.

So tell me, do you ever get used to this quiet? I ask.

You get addicted to it, she says.

You live close by? I ask, pointing in the general direction of the city.

No, we live in Cincinnati now. We moved not too long ago.

No kidding. So it was just my luck that you’re here?

No, you idiot, I came especially to see you. A two-hour drive.

Then she turned to me. Face-to-face. And immediately looked away.

It took time for me to work up the courage to kiss her. Back then, in Haifa.

We used to walk around the Carmel Center, somehow always arriving at the end of the Panorama Promenade that overlooks the refineries and the bay. On the one hand, the kiss was in the air, but on the other, her sarcasm undermined the already shaky self-confidence I had then. Before every date, I would decide, that’s it, this time it’ll happen, but the minute we exchanged our first words, I would decide to postpone leaning toward her until it was really the right moment. And then one night she said, in her usual cool tone, If you don’t want us to end up just friends, then you really should kiss me—

I don’t feel like going back to Israel, I confess.

Don’t I know it, she says, and looks at me. She’s wearing blue mascara. Like she used to back then. And there are small wrinkles under her eyes. Not like back then.

I wonder whether to tell her that the David Bowie CD didn’t soften Dikla, that she wouldn’t open her arms when I come home. And maybe she wouldn’t take her eyes off the TV. But I don’t want to sound desperate. So I say: This is the first time it’s happened to me, you know? I enjoy my trips, but I’m always glad to go home.

Of course, she says, and shifts her glance to the darkness. What I don’t understand is how people live in Israel with all the tension there.

Yes, I say.

A war every summer, she goes on, and if not in summer, then on the holidays—it’s not normal.

It’s not, I agree.

How can children grow up there without having a few screws loose?

I agree.

Sometimes I log on to Ynet—and it’s enough for me to see the name Yoram Sirkin in the headlines to remember how much I don’t miss any of it.

But still—I think but don’t say—you log on to Ynet.

My father died two years ago, she says. I flew there for the funeral.

Her father—I remember. A large man. A crane operator in the port. Came home from work wrecked, barely spoke, didn’t interfere when her mother harassed her at dinner but looked at her with compassion. And he’d pass her the salt a minute before she asked for it. Only once during the four years I was his daughter’s boyfriend did we talk. She was in the shower when I arrived to take her to the movies. Her mother wasn’t home. Her elder brother was in the army.

There’s something that…he began a sentence, but didn’t finish it—and pointed to the living room. We sat on the black leather couch. The TV was on, a soccer game. He was silent. He seemed to still be trying to choose his words. I almost said, It’s okay, don’t worry, she takes birth control pills. But I wasn’t sure that was the issue.

Be careful with her, okay? he finally said.

Okay.

She’s…much more sensitive than what she…he said, then stopped again.

I nodded.

And that was it. The shortest man-to-man conversation in history came to an end. His eyes and his body turned to the TV, and so did mine. The game being broadcast, I remember, was between two Haifa teams, Hapoel in red and Maccabi in green. Since I’m color blind, I couldn’t tell the difference between them, so I just pretended to be watching, while I was actually only waiting for his daughter to finish her shower.

I’m sorry for your loss, I say now.

Thank you, she says, no one’s said that to me for a long time. People stop saying that at some point, even though the loss still hurts.

That’s true, I agree, and almost tell her that Ari is dying. But I don’t want my own sorrow to encroach on hers.

I counted the minutes until the shivah would be over, she says. All those pastries, and the never-ending conversational loops. And the picture albums being passed around. I was the only one—the only one who wouldn’t look at them, the only one who remembered all the family trips, which were actually nightmares. And my mother, you know, she can’t be around me more than a few minutes without saying something nasty. I don’t get insulted anymore, you know, but I won’t keep quiet either.

Back then—she would feel hurt, come to my room in the middle of the night. Two knocks on the door of the separate entrance, and I would open it, in my sweats. She would take a small step inside, say, Hug me, and stay with me the rest of the night. In the morning, we’d walk hand in hand to school and French kiss in the corridor before she went into her class and I into mine.

When I went into the army, I sent her at least one letter a day from the base. So there would be something to keep her from going out with all the guys who were constantly after her. We always laughed, saying that the military censor who opened those letters definitely looked forward to reading them.

During my last year in the army, my parents went on a sabbatical to Boston, so the apartment she shared with her roommates on Hess Street became home for me. That’s where I went on weekends. That’s where I moved the few items of non-army clothing I had, my CD collection, and the Hapoel Jerusalem scarf.

Until one night—

She was babysitting for my older sister in Ramat Gan. And I was given a rare twenty-four-hour pass in the middle of the first intifada nightmare.

Hug me, I asked after she closed the door behind me, and as she hugged me, she opened the belt of my army pants and pulled me inside. We made love on the living-room couch for a long time, while Danielle, my sister’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, should have been sound asleep in her room. She had an afternoon nap every day, Danielle. Between one and three. Regular as clockwork. Today I know that there’s a moment when little kids stop taking afternoon naps, all at once, without warning. Every kid and their particular moment. But then—

Now she suggests we start walking again. There’s a kind of observation point she wants to show me.

It’s clear to me that as soon as we get up from the bench, she’ll notice that my lower back is slightly out of joint, and she’ll definitely say something about it.

But she doesn’t comment on it. Instead, she intertwines her fingers with mine.

I calm myself: It’s okay, you’re in the Midwest, no one knows you here.

And I think, It’s been so long since anyone touched me tenderly.

We walk hand in hand, in our regular positions, until we reach the observation point, which reminds me a bit of Atarim Square in Tel Aviv. A large, charmless concrete surface.

We lean against the railing, and then turn to each other and kiss. A brief kiss. Her lips are dry.

Hug me, she says.

And I hug her.

The feel of her body is both familiar and unfamiliar.

She caresses the back of my neck and I make my way through her curls to the back of her neck and draw circles on it with my fingers the way I remember she used to love.

We kiss again, a longer kiss. But still not with total abandonment.

My hotel…if you want…I mumble, not sure what I’m suggesting. She moves back slightly—we are still embracing but no longer pressed up against each other—and shakes her head, no.

But it’s only a story, I tell her.

She shakes her head, a bit more slowly this time, and strokes my chest with an open hand the way she knows I love, the way no one but she had ever stroked me, and says, We were lucky, you know? True love at such a young age. How many people have that?

And says, still caressing my chest, You hurt me so much. Leaving the way you did.

And says, You didn’t realize either that Danielle had left the house. You fell asleep, too. But you let your family blame it all on me.

And says, I still dream about it sometimes, you know? And in the dream there are no neighbors to come to the rescue at the last minute, it’s just me running out to the street, but my legs are heavy, too heavy, and the car hits her before I—

Tali, I—

I try to tell her something, but she puts a finger on my lips and says—

How does it help me now if you’re sorry.

And says, The only time I got out of bed for six months after we split up was when you came to collect your stuff.

And says, Since then, I have never let anyone hurt me like that.

And takes her finger off my lips and her hand off my chest and says, It’s important, the way we end things. You need to know that. And says, Don’t turn around. This time I’m the one who leaves, and you, don’t turn around.

So I don’t.

I don’t turn around. I hug myself against the spreading cold.

I look at the darkening skyscrapers of downtown.

At dawn, I walk slowly through the wide, empty streets to the hotel and check out.

Aren’t you afraid sometimes that, that’s it, you’ve run out of ideas, you’ve lost it?

I’m afraid of losing it. I’m afraid of losing Dikla. I’m afraid of losing the kids if I lose Dikla. I’m afraid of losing Ari. I’m afraid of having a heart attack in another three years, at the age my father had his. I’m afraid that, unlike him, I won’t survive. I’m afraid that this plane taking me from the Midwest to the Middle East will plunge into the Mediterranean Sea. I’m afraid that something will happen to Shira at Sde Boker and I won’t be there to protect her. I’m afraid that Shira won’t ever come back from Sde Boker. I’m afraid of an economic collapse. I’m afraid of a systems collapse. I’m afraid of a knock on the door, and on the other side is a policeman with a baton. I’m afraid of how easily things in Israel deteriorate into violence. I’m afraid there’ll be a war. I’m afraid I’ll be called to reserve duty. I’m afraid that the war will be a civil war.

What did you do in the army?

They picked me up at the train station in Phoenix. Or Minneapolis. I don’t remember anymore. All platforms look alike everywhere. She had moderately short hair, and he had long hair, slicked back with oil.

She said she lectured in the law department of a local college. He said he was in business and gave no details.

She drove, and he occasionally gave her instructions. Signal. Slow down. Be careful. Outside, snowflakes swirled, and she said we’d probably have a storm that night.

They spoke the heavily accented Hebrew of people who had been in America many years, and every now and then, they used a word that made me think they had left Israel at the end of the seventies or, at the latest, the early eighties.

I don’t remember how we came to speak about their son. But it happened pretty fast. Five, ten minutes after we set off. I think that at that point, I already felt the tension between them. It’s hard to explain how. Little things. Maybe it was because they didn’t smile at all. Not even when they met me at the station. Maybe it was her clenched, bitten lips. And the words seeming to flee from her mouth.

Our Benjamin is considering joining the IDF, she said.

Why did you say “considering,” honey. Benjy has already decided.

Maybe you’ve already decided, honey, she said.

I’m his father, he said in a voice trembling with controlled rage. I have the fucking right to offer my opinion, honey. Even if someone doesn’t like that opinion.

Was Benjamin born in Israel? I asked quickly, in the hope that a concrete question would prevent the argument from escalating.

No, she said. He was born after we moved.

So why would he want…? I asked.

Birthright, he replied. What do you call it, taglit ? He toured Israel for ten days with a group of Jewish kids and felt at home. Now he wants, and rightly so, to join the army because he feels it’s part of his identity.

And I’m worried, she said, looking at me in the rearview mirror as if I were the arbitrator who was supposed to pass judgment on the matter. I’m not sure he understands what it means to be a soldier and how different it is from his life here.

Stop treating him as if he were a little boy, he said.

He’s not a little boy anymore, but he’s still my child, she said.

He’s my child too, mind you, he said. And his hand, lying next to the hand brake, clenched into a fist.

When is he supposed to make his…final decision? I asked.

The deadline for the forms is next week, he said. But he’s already decided. You’re not listening, buddy.

What do you think, what would you advise him to do? she asked, giving me another quick glance.

What do I think? I repeated the question. Slowly. To gain some time. Maybe we’d suddenly arrive at the motel.

I shifted from where I was sitting. Until that moment, I’d been more behind her than behind him, and now I moved to a spot right in the middle, between the seats. The place my sister and I used to fight over during family trips.

Look, there are positive things to be said about both sides, I said. On the one hand—

Oh, come on, man, he said and punched the glove compartment. That’s what I can’t stand about your books too. There are so many points of view and voices, there’s no way of knowing what you really think. What do you bohemians call that, postmodern? Postmodern my ass. Sometimes you have to pick a side. That’s all there is to it. Come on. Choose.

Listen, it’s a complicated issue—

Just tell us what you think, man. Bottom line!

He pissed me off, that guy. His tone, and the fact that he called me buddy. And his patronizing comments to his wife about her driving—why don’t you drive yourself, you shit?—and I was also on edge because I hadn’t been able to fall asleep on the plane and that trip to the States was turning out to be a total professional flop. Just like the ones that preceded it.

What do I think? I fired back. I think there are ways to unite with your Israeli identity other than joining the army.

That’s exactly what I say, the woman said.

Don’t misunderstand me, I qualified my words. I’m not sorry I served in the army. It’s part of being a citizen in my country. It’s an obligation. But to join the army of your own free will? As an “experience”? Sorry, there are experiences that can contribute in much more positive ways to the development of an eighteen-year-old boy than shooting rubber bullets at children or standing at checkpoints.

Stop the car, the man told his wife in English.

There’s no place to stop here, she replied in Hebrew.

Stop the fucking car, he shouted. And closed his hand around the brake. As if he were planning to stop the car himself if she didn’t.

Okay, Effi, another minute! she said. And signaled. And looked at her side mirror. And looked at the mirror on the passenger side.

I was sure they were going to throw me out of the car. That happened to me once, with Ari. Before going into the army, we were invited to his uncle’s house in Eilat, and somehow, the conversation at dinner turned to politics. The next morning, we were politely asked to leave.

Why the hell don’t I learn from my mistakes?

My leg muscles were poised for movement. I even managed to wind my scarf around my neck. But when the car pulled over to the side of the road, he was the one who opened his door and stepped out into the raging snowstorm.

The slam of the door shook the chassis.

The woman and I stayed where we were.

It’s okay, she turned to me and said. He’ll come back in another few minutes.

You’re sure? It’s pretty stormy out there…

That’s what they taught him to do in the anger management course. A second before he loses control completely, he has to try to cut off contact. Simply move away from the situation. It usually helps.

And in the meantime…?

We wait. It’s only a few minutes, really. Want a piece of spearmint gum?

I said yes, even though I can’t stand spearmint. She handed me the pack and said, He’s really a bookworm, Effi. I want you to know that. He gets a shipment of books from Israel every week and devours them all in one weekend. He’s the one who insisted on bringing you to the Jewish Community Center.

Lightning flashed across the sky from one end to the other, like the terrifying lightning bolt on the cover of the Dire Straits’ album Love Over Gold. I’ve never seen lightning like that in Israel. It was followed by a tremendous clap of thunder.

Isn’t it a little…dangerous for him to be outside? I asked again.

There’s nothing to worry about, he’ll be right back, she said.

So when…in fact…did you leave Israel? I asked. So she would have something to answer.

In eighty-five, she said.

Wow, I said.

After the Lebanon War.

I understand.

Effi was…he was in the building that collapsed in Tyre.

I didn’t know there were any survivors in the Tyre disaster.

Very few.

Tell me, does he have a phone or something? Sorry for nagging you, but…

He left his phone here—she pointed to the phone in the coffee-cup holder—but this isn’t…this isn’t the first time he’s done this. And he always comes back in the end. Another piece of gum?

No thanks.

When we were in Israel, he used to write letters to the editor, you know, demanding that the government set up a national commission of inquiry.

For what?

He’s sure that it was a car bomb that destroyed the headquarters in Tyre. He saw it arrive.

But they said it was a gas tank, no?

He claims that the CID report was one big whitewash. That, with his own eyes, he saw a Peugeot drive into the area. And there was no explosion until after that.

You don’t say.

He sent letters to the editors of different newspapers every week.

Wow.

It wasn’t until we arrived here that he stopped that craziness.

Tell me…Maybe we should drive around to try and find him? It’s been…quite a while.

She looked at her watch. Then at the side mirror. And then she took a deep breath and said: We’ll wait another two or three minutes. I don’t want him to come back and not find us here.

Of course, I said. I looked at her face in the rearview mirror. Nothing I saw indicated that she was worried or upset. She was only very pale. But I didn’t know her well enough to decide whether that was unusual.

You’re probably dying to get to the hotel already, she said, looking at me matter-of-factly. I’m really sorry we’re holding you up…Effi is going through a sensitive period now because of the business with Benjy—

It’s okay, I said. I’m in no hurry. But I have to say that something here…is not clear to me. If Effi…I mean, if that’s the experience he had in the army, then why—

The door opened suddenly and Effi stepped into the car, soaked to the bone. Snowflakes stuck to his greasy hair. His teeth chattered.

She shifted gears and began to drive.

Slowly, at first, as if she wanted to be sure he wouldn’t leap out again, and then at normal speed.

We were silent all the way to the hotel.

He looked too embarrassed to speak.

She looked like someone whose major concern was that everything would at least look normal again.

And I was afraid that anything I might say would stir up trouble again. At some point, I remember, she turned on the radio to make the silence less awkward, and of all the songs in the world, the Dolly Parton–Kenny Rogers duet filled the air.

Islands in the stream, that is what we are…Sail away with me to another world—

The third time Parton and Rogers sang the chorus, he reached out, pressed a button, and turned them off.

I really understood how he felt.

We reached the hotel parking bay. She turned half her body to me and said: Effi and I will pick you up at a quarter to seven. Is that okay with you? Wait for us at the entrance?

Her tone was forced. American. Dolly Parton–ish.

Thank you, that would be just great, I said with the same contagious inflection.

Effi didn’t come with her to pick me up at a quarter to seven. Instead, their Benjy was sitting in the backseat.

I looked at him through the mirror. Children are usually a fascinating combination of their parents, but that boy looked like he wasn’t part of them or of this place. I realized why he felt at home in Israel.

Effi sends his apologies for not joining us, she said. I think he’s caught a cold. What a winter we’re having this year, right Benjy?

Oh my God, totally. What’s it like in Israel now? Benjy asked.

Sunny, I admitted.

It’s never really cold in Israel, right?

Someone has to tell him, I said to myself. Someone has to tell him something, at least—so, unlike me, he’ll go into the army a bit more prepared.

I’d actually tried to prepare then. A week in Gadna, the pre-army field course. Lectures in school by army officers. Long talks with my father, who fought in the Six-Day War, and with Uncle Albert, a veteran of the Yom Kippur War. But I think that all the people in charge of smoothing my entry into army life had conspired together. None of them told me how difficult, how impossible it was to turn someone into a soldier overnight. None of them put a hand on my shoulder and warned me simply: For the next three years, your soul, not only your body, will be in danger.

On the way to the Jewish Community Center, we talked about the weather, Benjy and I. A little about the nightclubs in Tel Aviv. But every time I was about to break my silence, I pictured him screaming in response: Stop the car. And leaping out alone into the storm, which, through the window, looked even wilder now than it had in the afternoon. More dangerous.

His mother didn’t intervene in our idle conversation, only stole a quick, almost pleading glance at me every now and then. Her jaw was clenched.

The lecture itself was as embarrassing as all its predecessors on this Jewish American tour. I mean, the hall wasn’t completely empty. The amplifier worked. I read passages from my books. They asked questions. They even laughed once—except for Benjy’s mother, whose face remained impassive. But, as always in America, I had the feeling that there was some basic misunderstanding between me and the audience. A bottomless pit of expectations I could never meet. As if I didn’t conform to the image of an Israeli they had in their minds—or even worse, the Israel I described in my books didn’t resemble the one they wanted to see in their mind’s eye: the Israel of oranges, folk dancing, and Operation Entebbe. The only one who listened to me with yearning eyes, and even nodded occasionally in solidarity, was Benjy.

I’ve lost the audience anyway, I thought, so at least I can do something for the boy—

There was a copy of one of my books on the podium. I opened it, riffled through it for a few moments, and stopped on a random page.

It was in Nablus—I read straight from memory because I had never managed to write about that night—and they woke us up at two in the morning to clean slogans off the walls. There was this policy at the time of the first intifada: During the day, Palestinian kids sprayed anti-Israeli slogans on the walls of the Palestinian camp, and at night, Israeli soldiers went into the houses, pulled people out of their beds, and made them wipe away the slogans with their own hands.

We knocked on the door—or more accurately, banged on it—and an unshaven grandfather leaning on a cane opened it. We could see the trappings of an entire life behind him: couches, a TV, a sideboard, mattresses on which the family members slept. Alon, the commander of our platoon, ordered the grandfather, in Hebrew, to go out of the house. The grandfather said something, maybe he asked if he could change his clothes. But Alon said no, grabbed him by the arm, and frog-marched him a few dozen meters to the wall sprayed with slogans.

We watched them as we secured the periphery, and when we reached the wall, Alon asked the old man: Who did this? The old man replied, La’aerif. I don’t know. From the way he spoke, it was clear that he really didn’t know.

This was repeated four or five times. Alon asked more loudly each time, and the old man replied more weakly each time, close to tears.

Meanwhile, someone else came out of the house with a pail and a rag. A younger man. And stood beside the old man. Leave my father alone, please, he said to Alon in solid Hebrew. I’ll clean it off. Alon ignored him and asked the old man again: Who did this? Don’t lie to me that you don’t know! And the old man said, more accurately sobbed, La’aerif. And then, to our great shock, Alon slapped him. Hard. Almost punched him.

The old man, who, until that moment, had been leaning on his cane, lost his balance and collapsed onto the sidewalk. The cane fell out of his hand and rolled away, and his body, which had folded into itself, looked suddenly very small, like a child’s. His son yelled in Hebrew, What are you doing? What do you want from him? And moved a step forward. But Alon promptly aimed his rifle at him and shouted that he’d better start cleaning, or he’d get a bullet in the head. The son gave him a defiant look, but bit his lips, picked up the pail, and dipped the rag in it. A minute or two later, the father stood up, with great effort, and joined his son. Moving swiftly, they washed off the slogan, and when the last letter had disappeared, Alon signaled with a movement of his rifle barrel that they could go back inside. The father obeyed the order immediately, but the son stayed a moment longer, put his hand on the wall where the slogan had been, and only then joined his father. Alon followed them with his loaded rifle until they disappeared into the house.

We watched them and secured the periphery.

At the end of every week of the officer training course, we had a summarizing discussion with the platoon commander. Before the discussion following the incident with the old man, we spoke among ourselves in the tent and decided that if Alon didn’t bring it up, we would.

Toward the end of the discussion, when we realized that he planned to ignore what had happened, we signaled each other with our eyes. Dror, the huge navy guy, spoke first, followed by Amit, from the medical corps, and then me. We all said more or less the same thing: that we didn’t understand why he had to slap the old man. We chose our words carefully. We said we really wanted to understand. To have it explained to us. We were all new at this business in the territories. And he, Alon, had a lot of experience.

In response, his face turned redder than his beret, and it seemed that, in another minute, he’d aim his rifle at us.

He said: You want an explanation?

He said: Should I tell you about Rudner from my platoon who had a refrigerator dropped on his head from a roof in Jenin and has been in rehabilitation for a year already? Or do you prefer to hear about Samama, whose face was burned by a Molotov cocktail they threw into his jeep?

He said: This is war here, in case you didn’t realize it. We’re at war.

He said all that—but didn’t dare to touch any other Palestinian during our patrols in the alleyways of the camps. As soon as he realized that he wasn’t getting any support from us—that we wouldn’t secure the periphery for incidents like that—he took a step back.

And began to abuse us.

Until the end of the course, he took every opportunity to make our lives a misery. There was no mistaking the look in his eyes when he sent us running all over the base for no good reason, confined us to quarters on Saturdays, and looked for excuses to throw us out of the course: He despised us.

My army service can be divided into two parts: before that night in Nablus, and after it.

Something inside me broke that night, but something began to grow as well.

I closed the book and gestured to the audience that that was it, I had finished reading and the meeting was over. I thanked them in English. Then in Hebrew.

There was a light sprinkling of applause.

People put on their coats and spoke together in hushed voices as they made their way out.

Of my dozens of books, only two copies were bought at the improvised table-stand.

One by Benjy.

He asked if I would write a dedication to him in Hebrew.

His mother approached, put a gentle hand on his shoulder, offered me a pen, and said quietly, and quite genuinely, “Thank you.” Her face remained frozen. Expressionless. But it seemed to me that I could see the thin trail of a tear running down her cheek. Or maybe it was just a wrinkle.

I took the pen—and it remained in the air for several long seconds. I couldn’t decide between a few seemingly personal but actually generic dedications I use in such cases, but then a Meir Ariel song began to play in my head, “It’s Been a Rough Night on Our Forces at the Suez.” Go figure how our minds work. In retrospect, I think it was because the first words are, “I’m reading Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway, in a beautiful translation by Aharon Amir”—and “Islands in the Stream” by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers was still stuck in my inner music player. In any case, at the end of Meir Ariel’s song, there are a few lines in English:

Hey nice Jewish boy

What are you doing here?

Hey nice Jewish boy

Nothing for you here, go home.

Hey nice Jewish boy

You go see some nice Jewish girl.

Hey nice Jewish boy

Go home.

It had never been clear to me who Meir Ariel was singing those lines to. An American soldier, a new immigrant come to relieve him on watch? Himself?

And when I wrote them in the dedication, in Hebrew letters, I wasn’t sure who I was writing to: Benjy? Myself? Both?

I saw him a week ago, the boy. At the Binyamina train station. There’s that moment when the doors open, and the people on the platform wait until the flow of disembarking passengers stops.

He was the last one off, wearing a uniform and red paratrooper boots and carrying a rifle, holding his cell to his ear and speaking.

He looked like he belonged.

Did you ever do anything you’re ashamed of?

The first intifada broke out when I was in the officer training course. They sent my company to the territories and returned us to base, then sent us to the territories again and returned us again. That went on for thirty-five days, during which we never saw home. Even worse, I never saw Tali Leshem. I’d pursued her for the entire last two years of high school, and she’d finally let me catch her only a few months before I went into the army.

Which is what caused the first year of my army service to consist mainly of finding ways to go home so I could see her.

The moment when this story takes place, I felt—as I do now, with Dikla—that Tali was going to leave me.

Something in her voice was clouded over (we spoke on pay phones, there was no WhatsApp or texting).

Her letters kept getting shorter.

When I asked her if she was tired of waiting, she said no, but her tone said, Yes, I am.

In short, I felt that I had to see her, or else I would lose her.

But we had no leaves. For thirty-five days. And I felt I would go crazy. Go fucking AWOL. Nothing else mattered.

And then, on a Thursday, the platoon commander issued an order. Three members of the platoon, chosen by a lottery run by his current aide, could go home.

The aide was Dror, a career soldier from the navy who slept in the bunk above me. He was a few years older than us. Someone you could trust.

He waited until we were in the personnel carrier that would take us to field training, sat down in the seat closest to the driver, facing us, and asked each of us to write his name on a slip of paper and hand it to him. Then he put all the slips of paper in a hat and mixed them up.

I’ve never won a lottery. For years, my sister used to buy me scratch cards, and the only time I won—I won a free scratch card.

I had no expectations from that lottery. If anything, I had a feeling of defeat foretold.

And then Dror chose the first slip of paper and read out my name.

I was so happy. I could have jumped with happiness. I hadn’t felt such a sense of freedom and relief very often in my life.

The minute we got out of the van, Dror started walking toward me, and then took advantage of a moment when we were far away from the others and said: So, are you happy?

You bet I am, I said.

Great, he said. Thanks to me.

I turned pale. What do you mean, thanks to you?

When I folded the pieces of paper, I folded yours so it would be larger than the others. That way I could find it more easily.

But why?

I heard you talking to Sabo the other day about your girlfriend. I thought you needed this leave more than anyone else.

Thanks, I said. But I felt a heaviness in my heart. Because in terms of the officer training course, he had committed an offense, and had made me, against my will, an accomplice.

In the officer training course, only three things are important to your commanders: Trustworthiness. Trustworthiness. Trustworthiness.

Not only in the course. My father—I had never heard him lie or scheme.

The whole business ran counter to who I am.

What should I do?

During the night between Thursday and Friday, the guys from the platoon teased me about my good luck. After lights-out, Sabo came to my bunk and asked if I could take a letter he wrote to his mother, who was hospitalized. His brother would come to pick it up. I said, Yes, bro, sure. And I couldn’t fall asleep all night. Should I expose the deceit and get Dror into trouble, or should I go home at the expense of one of my friends? That is, go along with the deceit?

Friday morning I got up, dressed, and went home.

I wanted so much to go home.

But then, when I reached Haifa, the pressure apparently got the better of me and I just broke down. All that Saturday, I got out of bed only to eat. I ate very little and hurried back to bed. My parents understood that something had happened, but didn’t dare ask me. Tali Leshem came to visit me. I told her about the lottery and she didn’t understand what the big deal was. At her post in the administrative office, dirty pool was par for the course, she said. Later we had sex, but she didn’t come and got up quickly to shower. Then she hurried back to her parents’ house. And didn’t kiss me goodbye. She called Saturday night, sounding distant, and didn’t suggest we meet.

On Sunday, I went back to the base. Dror was the only one in our room. Wearing his navy whites.

I was drinking a can of orange soda and I felt like spilling the entire contents on that uniform.

So how was your Saturday? he asked, and patted my shoulder.

Just another Saturday, I replied.

What do you mean? Did you see your girlfriend? Did you calm down?

Sure, I said.

And no thanks for Dror, who set it up for you? He gave me a small punch on the shoulder.

Thanks, bro—I raised my hand to my temple and saluted him—I’ll never forget it.

Do you ever dream about your characters?

I’ll get to that in a minute. It’s just that…I’m still thinking about the previous question. I keep remembering more and more things I’m ashamed of, and all of a sudden, I think that the story about Dror and the lottery was actually meant to conceal other stories, darker ones—

We left Oren, from Hadera, sick in Peru. In a small, ugly city on the shore of Lake Titicaca. I don’t remember the name. Maybe I’ll google it later. In any case, he was burning up with fever, almost 104 degrees. Maybe if it had passed the 104 mark, we would have stayed. Maybe not. We had a plan for our trek and we wanted to follow it. Bolivia. Then Brazil. Although Ari had agreed back in Israel that if he met a girl—not one just for the night, someone he really liked—all options were open, anything was possible and no hard feelings. But Oren was a guy. An Israeli. From Hadera. He had a good smile and big, happy eyes. We met him in Cusco at one of those Mama Africa parties and hit it off right away. I mean, he always told boring jokes like the ones that start with “A Christian, a Muslim, and a Jew get on a plane,” and there wasn’t a day when he didn’t get into a noisy, almost violent argument when he bargained with a street vendor, but the trio—Ari, Oren, and I—worked well together. He injected some new energy at the point in the trek when Ari and I needed it. When he asked if he could join us to Titicaca, we looked at each other and said together: Sure, great idea.

When I re-create the events in my mind, it doesn’t seem as if there were early signs of his illness. On the contrary, he looked like a pretty strong guy. Energetic.

An hour after the bus left, he vomited the first time. Into a bag. Then he turned very pale, and half an hour later, he vomited again. And that’s how it continued, every half hour. After each time, he said he was sorry.

No “sorry” necessary, we said. We got more bags from other passengers. We poured him tea from the thermos we bought from a street vendor on one of the stops. We said to him, Try to close your eyes, sleep a little.

When he finally fell asleep, Ari covered him with his poncho, put a hand on his forehead, and said, Wow, he’s burning up.

After a ten-hour ride on the bus, we arrived at our destination. Ari climbed on the roof and took down our three backpacks. Down below, I supported a wobbly Oren to keep him from falling and said, Don’t worry, we’ll be at the hostel in a minute and you can rest in the room.

When we reached the hostel, it turned out that they didn’t have a room for three. We pretended to be disappointed, but honestly, we were relieved. We didn’t want to catch whatever he had. Ari carried the backpack up to his room and said we’d meet at breakfast the next day, and that we’d get him something from the pharmacy to settle his stomach. When he didn’t come down for breakfast, we knocked on his door and asked whether we should bring him something to eat, and from the other side of the door, he said he was dead tired and maybe he would join us later. We went out in search of a pharmacy in the town, described by Lonely Planet as picturesque, but which in reality reminded both of us of the northern Egyptian town of Rafah: Ruins instead of houses. Sewage running in the streets. Rebellion in the eyes of the residents.

We looked at each other and said in unison, “Weren’t we here already?”—our code on the trek for “It’s time to take off from this place or these people”—and went to the port to find out when we could catch the ferry to Isla del Sol in Bolivia. It turned out that in the off-season, it only sailed twice a week, but luckily, one of those times was the next day. At seven in the morning. We also found the town’s only pharmacy next to the port. But it was closed. And according to the sign hanging on the door, it wouldn’t open until eight the next morning. Neither of us mentioned Oren as we walked back to the hostel, but it was clear that we were thinking about him, and when we reached the room, Ari said, Let’s at least bring him some tea and toast. We went downstairs to the grungy lobby, and while Ari made Oren some tea, I went to the restaurant across the street and asked for tostada, con nada. We went back up to our floor with the tea and toast and knocked on the door. At first, there was no answer. Ari said, I think he died, and I said, Not funny. But I laughed. We knocked harder, and then heard a weak voice say: It’s open. We went inside and found Oren in bed. Watching a soccer game on the tiny TV with its rabbit-ear antenna that stood on the small cabinet across from his bed. His face was very pale. His eyes were glistening, as if he were crying. Who’s playing? Ari asked and sat down a safe distance from him. Who the hell knows, Oren said. Hapoel Cusco versus Beitar Lima. How do you feel? I asked, and sat down too. Lousy, Oren said. I took his temperature. Almost 104.

Fucking shit, Ari said.

Did you find a pharmacy? Oren asked.

There is one here, I said, but it doesn’t open until tomorrow.

It’s a lucky thing you guys are with me, Oren said.

We looked at each other and didn’t speak.

Then Ari said, The truth is that, for the time being, you’re not missing anything, bro. This town is disgusting.

It is? Oren said. Because Lonely Planet says—

Lonely Planet also says that the ferry to Bolivia leaves the port twice a day.

And what’s the truth?

Twice a week. Sunday and Thursday.

What day is today? I’m totally out of it.

Wednesday.

Wow. Excuse me a sec, I need the bathroom.

When he came back, we didn’t talk about the ferry anymore.

We watched Hapoel Cusco versus Beitar Lima. I think I’ve never seen a game in my life with so many red cards. At least seven. Every few minutes, the referee sent a player off the field, and they refused to leave each time, until their teammates pushed them off so the game could continue.

Take the ferry tomorrow, Oren said when the game ended.

We’ll see how you feel, I said.

Listen to this joke, Oren said. A straight guy, a homo, and a trans get on a train—

Ari and I give each other a “not again” look.

But Oren broke off in the middle of the joke and said, I’ll be right back. And rushed off to the bathroom again.

When he came back, Ari had already taken out a deck of cards and we played Yaniv on the bed until Oren said he was wiped out, but we could keep playing without him.

Ari collected the cards and I smoothed the sheet, which had become wrinkled when we sat on it.

We stood at the door.

Oren coughed lightly and said, Take the ferry tomorrow, guys. Don’t wait for me.

This time, I didn’t say anything.

Ari said, We’re in room four, bro, if you need something.

We had a huge alarm clock we’d bought in the thieves’ market in Quito. It rang so loudly that you couldn’t argue with it. We set it for six in the morning. The sun hadn’t risen yet and we got organized quickly. Literally, without making a sound. As if Oren were with us in the room and we were afraid he’d wake up. Neither of us mentioned him until we boarded the ferry. Only after we had moved away from the coast and the sunrise began to glitter on the water did Ari ask: You think we should have stayed with him? And before I could reply, he answered his own question, And then what? We’d have been stuck in Rafah until Sunday? Hello, this is a trek here, not punishment.

The ferry got stuck in the middle of the lake. One of the motors broke down. We waited half a day for another ferry to arrive, and we boarded it. In Isla del Sol, on the steps leading from the port to the hostel, Ari slipped and sprained his ankle. But only a week later, when we realized that someone had stolen our backpacks, with all our equipment in them, from the roof of the bus we had taken to La Paz, Ari declared the existence of the “Oren from Hadera curse” for the first time. We should have stayed with that Oren guy, he said. Fever almost 104, bro. Not a joke.

The Oren from Hadera curse pursued us for the next few weeks: We set out on a mountain trek and had to go back because of a snowstorm. When we got back, it turned out that all the rooms in the recommended hostel were taken and we had to go to a different hostel that was hideously depressing. No hot water in the shower. For a minute, I thought our luck had changed, because it was in that depressing hostel that Ari met Clara from Canada, the only girl he really liked in South America. But then we found out she had a boyfriend.

When we returned to La Paz, Ari dragged me to the Witches’ Market. To remove the curse.

We wandered around among the stalls until we found an old lady who supposedly understood English. We told her the story and she nodded and said, Very bad, very bad. Then she gave us two bottles filled with a yellow liquid and told us to drink them in one swallow at exactly midnight. We followed her instructions. An hour later, it turned out that the yellow liquid caused a huge, painful erection that lasted until morning, and two days later, in the middle of the street, someone grabbed my pouch, which contained four hundred dollars in cash.

We have to find Oren from Hadera, Ari said.

And fast, I said.

A long silence followed because neither of us had the slightest idea how to do it. There was no Facebook then. No cell phones. Nothing.

In Uyuni, a small city considered the entrance to Salar, the Bolivian salt flats, we met a group of eight Israelis looking for a minyan, not for prayer, but two people to fill the empty seats in their ten-seater van and join them on their trek. During the drive through the salt flats, they began talking about the antimalarial drug Lariam, and the sick dreams the people who take it have, although, if that’s true, a girl said, no matter how scary that drug is, it’s even scarier to stop taking it. Just last week the consulate flew an Israeli trekker from Peru to Israel after he caught malaria. Wow, really? Ari and I asked together, our voices too loud. Yes, she went on, the people he was traveling with left him behind and took off as if nothing had happened. The guy sitting next to her said, He was probably traveling with Germans, Israelis never leave the wounded behind. Never, Ari echoed his words. He looked at me. And lowered his eyes.

But then there was something else. In Brazil, on the beach in Fortaleza, we met a broad-shouldered Dutch girl who grimaced when we told her we were from Israel. Israeli men are bad news, she said, refusing to elaborate. It wasn’t until that night, after a few beers, that she agreed to tell us that a week earlier, in Rio, she met an Israeli guy named Oren. He always told her unfunny jokes, she said, but she was extremely lonely and hadn’t had sex for six months already, so she invited him to her room. But then, in the middle of getting it on, she said, out of nowhere, he slapped me. What the fuck? the Dutch girl asked, as if we were the ones who had slapped her. What a nutcase, I said. According to the law, that’s assault, Ari said. And the Dutch girl said he told her it was because of some trauma he had in the army. That he couldn’t control it. Bullshit, she said, slapping her open hand down on the bar. Fucking bullshit.

So…what does he look like, that guy? Ari asked. The Dutch girl almost broke the bottle over his head. Come on, man, that’s what you care about? After everything I told you, that’s what you’re interested in? What he looks like? If you describe him to us, Ari persisted, we can slap him when we see him. You would really do that? she asked, looking at him hopefully. Ari nodded. So she described the guy, who sounded as if he looked like our Oren: A receding hairline, like a forty-year-old. A kid’s smile. Happy eyes. Bargains like a crazy man with the street vendors.

I would have liked to say that when we came back to Israel we went to Hadera to look for Oren. Or that we at least went to the newspaper archives in Beit Ariela to check whether, while we were in South America, there had been a report about an Israeli trekker urgently flown home from Peru because he’d caught malaria. But the truth is that we left the story behind us. Just like we left Oren behind us.

He didn’t appear in our photo album of the trip. Or in the letters from the trip. I was ashamed to talk about him to Dikla when we came back, and I was ashamed to write about him when I wrote about South America.

Over the years, the shame faded. Because it’s the way of shame to fade. Only the curse was left. Ari and I still blame it for every bad thing that happens to either of us:

The engine died on the way up to Jerusalem? The Oren from Hadera curse.

Hapoel lost right at the final buzzer? The Oren from Hadera curse.

Ari has pancreatic cancer? The Oren from Hadera curse. (That’s what he said when he called to tell me about his tests. I didn’t respond. I didn’t know what a person says in such a situation. And he said: The Oren from Hadera curse strikes again, bro.)

Do you dream about your characters?

Wait a minute, there’s one last thing I have to get out of my system. But I just can’t write it. You know, in the first person. There’s a limit to honesty. Even in this interview. So I’ll do what I usually do.

HARASSMENT

It takes him a few seconds to recognize her. And even then, he isn’t sure she recognizes him. Whether she recognized him earlier from his name or only when he came into the room. Or maybe she’s embarrassed. You can’t tell anything from looking at her. She doesn’t blush. Doesn’t stammer. She continues asking him questions and typing as he replies.

She had been one of his soldiers. He was an officer, a first lieutenant. A small unit in the Intelligence Corps. Four huts. A tile path connecting them. A broken drink machine, long lunch breaks, long nights of work during operations.

On one of those nights, he thought he saw a flash of invitation in her eyes. Or maybe there really had been a flash of invitation in her eyes. What difference does it make—

Now the look in her eyes is all business.

She asks: It says here that you’re studying for your master’s. You haven’t completed it yet?

He replies: I’ve already submitted my thesis. Now I’m only waiting for official approval.

Where do you live? she asks. What’s that zero four area code?

Binyamina. It’s less than half an hour away from here by train, he replies.

She nods slowly. As if his answers are unsatisfactory.

He began to drive her home on Fridays, to Beit Hanan. Told her it was on his way, but both of them knew it wasn’t. On the drive, they spoke in a totally different tone from the one they used the rest of the week on the base. She told him that she wrote poems and short stories, but she didn’t think she wanted to be a writer. It was such an egotistical profession. He told her that since his mother died, they no longer had Friday-night dinners at home, and his father had become addicted, really addicted, to Coca-Cola. The time in the car passed quickly, too quickly, and when they arrived at her house, she would linger in the car another few seconds, as if she were waiting for something to happen, and then she touched his arm lightly and said, Wait a minute, and disappeared. When she came back, she held a bag of blood oranges from their orchard. Food for the road.

She still has long hair, even if some of it is silver now. But she no longer winds the strands around her finger when she stops to think.

Your age, she says, are you aware that it’s a disadvantage? Most of the marketing staff is in their thirties. And I should prepare you for the fact that we almost never take on people over fifty. It hardly ever happens.

Her inflection—he thinks—is almost the same.

There are also advantages to my age, he tries.

She touches the bridge of her glasses, pushes them back into place, and doesn’t ask him to list them.

Besides, I’m young at heart, he says.

She doesn’t smile.

She was nineteen and he was twenty-one. A two-year difference, that was all. But he was the chief officer of the section and she was just an ordinary soldier. There were no roll calls in their unit, she didn’t have to salute him, but the hierarchy was most definitely there, in small things. Who ate in the officers’ canteen and who didn’t. Who had his own computer and who didn’t. Who participated in pre-operation discussions and who only prepared the documents, made appointments, and swept the office floor at the end of the day, moving as if she were dancing.

She’s typing something on her computer now. Apparently filling out a standard form. Does it make sense that she doesn’t recognize him? Yes, he’s bald. And has a potbelly. And started wearing glasses a year ago. And his name isn’t exactly uncommon. When he and Nirit got married, they decided to blend their surnames, so from Gonter, his name, and Oren, hers, they created Goren. But even so, how is it possible that she doesn’t remember anything, while he watches her type with those long fingers of hers and remembers everything. The entire scene appears before his eyes.

One Friday, when they started their drive, he told her that they had to stop off in the apartment he and his roommates shared in Tel Aviv. He had forgotten to take his bag of laundry, he said. And he would be happy if she would help him carry it because there was a ton of it. They went into the apartment and he immediately asked her how many sugars he should put in her coffee. She said, No thanks. He asked if the no thanks was about the sugar or about the coffee. Both, she said, and remained standing. Why are you standing, make yourself at home, he said, and touched her for the first time, placing a hand on her shoulder and leading her toward the blue couch, thinking: Exactly the way I pictured it, it’s happening exactly the way I pictured it. Then he went into the kitchen and made himself coffee, twice, because he was so excited, he put two spoonfuls of salt in the first cup.

When he returned, he sat down very close to her, his leg almost touching hers, sipped his coffee, and asked: Are you sure you don’t want any? She shook her head, and he leaned over to put his cup on the small table. Then, with a pounding heart, he leaned his elbow on the back of the couch, stretched out his arm and trapped a strand of hair with two of his fingers.

What’s your family situation? she suddenly says. I forgot to ask.

Happily married plus three fantastic girls, he says.

How old are your daughters? she asks.

Twelve, fourteen, and eighteen. The oldest is starting the army on Sunday.

Where will she serve? A spark of interest ignites in her voice. Or is he just imagining it?

Intelligence, he says with a smile. He’s thinking that if even the tiniest muscle in her face moves now, it’s a sign.

But her face is frozen. Her body is frozen. Only her fingers continue to type. How much can she possibly have to type?

Then, too, she froze. But he continued to twist a strand of hair around his fingers, finding it difficult to part from the fantasy he had spun for so many months. Then he moved his fingers down her neck, as he had in the fantasy, to her beautiful collarbone, slightly lowering the Dacron collar so he could move along her collarbone to her shoulder, and a long moment later, he stopped. He asked her if it felt good. She moved her head slowly but clearly. To the right and then to the left. He touched her hair one last time and returned his hand to his lap. And that was that. He didn’t press up against her. Didn’t kiss her on the mouth. Didn’t tear off her uniform. On the contrary, he moved back and drank his now cool coffee as she rearranged her collar, and they sat beside each other in silence for another few moments. Along with the bitter disappointment and the desire to get on his knees and ask her forgiveness, anger began to grow inside him. All those light, seemingly random touches throughout the week in the office. All the times she leaned over his desk to show him documents, her long hair whipping his face, and the small dance of her sweeping the floor at the end of the day that seemed meant to emphasize her narrow waist. And the brief lingering a moment before she got out of his car in Beit Hanan, the lingering he was convinced meant: Kiss me.

Now he says: Excuse me—can I add something?

She straightens her glasses on her nose and says: I’m listening.

I’ll be as straight as I can with you, he says. When I left my last job, I never imagined it would be so hard to find work in this field. You saw my CV. You will agree with me that it’s not…sparse. Nevertheless, I’ve been going from interview to interview for six months now, and they give me the feeling that, because of my age, I’m not…current enough. Which is ridiculous. In marketing, it’s not age that counts, it’s hunger. Only hunger counts. Don’t you think so, Rotem?

Her lips tremble slightly when he says her name, and for the first time, he suspects that her behavior at this meeting is one big sham. But she quickly overcomes the trembling, goes back to typing, and says impassively, It doesn’t really matter what I think. There is an entire staff here that will make the decision.

But you have some influence, right? he persists.

Yes, I have some influence, she confirms.

So maybe you could pass on the message—he asks, his voice sounding too high in his ears, too pleading—that I am prepared to work hard. That if you give me the green light, I’ll get results.

I promise to pass on the message, she says with a small smile, a tiny smile, which he thought was more like a smirk. Then she looks at her watch. More accurately, she lifts her arm with the watch on it so he can see that she’s looking at her watch.

He gets the hint and asks, So what now, don’t call us, we’ll call you?

You’ll receive an e-mail, she explains as she stands up. Within a week, two weeks at the most.

He stands up, too, and she accompanies him to the door. A moment before he leaves, he considers saying something about what happened back then. But he still isn’t sure that she has made the connection and is afraid to hurt his chances—small as they might be—he needs the job. So, behind his glasses, his eyes look straight into her eyes behind her glasses and he says, Thank you for…your time.

What could he actually have said to her? he justifies himself in the elevator. That he’s sorry? That he apologizes? After all, what really happened there? Confusion. That’s all. Misinterpreted signs. He was only twenty-one at the time. He’d barely had a girlfriend before then, and it hadn’t been serious. He didn’t understand anything about anything. Even now, if God forbid Nirit were to leave him and he had to start all over again, he’d be just as lost. Clueless and clumsy.

When he leaves the parking lot, he thinks about his last drive to Beit Hanan.

After some silence, she asked, in a barely audible voice, if he could drive her home. Is it okay if I finish my coffee first? he asked. She nodded and eased her body away from him, a few centimeters to the left. He deliberately sipped his coffee slowly, and thought, What a mistake. She can file a complaint about me.

All the way to Beit Hanan, they didn’t exchange a word. She sat pressed up against the window and he clutched the wheel as if it were a lifesaver. There was a stop-and-go traffic jam on the coastal highway, and his leg hurt from so much pressing on and releasing of the clutch. On the radio, someone was translating love songs from English: “Mary Jane,” “Woe Is Me,” “Better Off Dead,” “Oh Carol,” “My Destiny,” “You’re Are My Happiness.” A bit before Netanya, he thought she was crying, but when he turned his head, he saw that she was only blowing her nose. There are more tissues in the glove compartment if you need them, he said, and she said, No thanks.

When they finally reached Beit Hanan, she opened the door quickly, pulled her backpack out of the backseat in a single movement, making do with one strap instead of two, walked to her parents’ house, and didn’t come back with blood oranges from the orchard.

Back at the base on Sunday, they both acted as if nothing had happened. He didn’t take it out on her after the incident. Didn’t order her to do meaningless tasks, didn’t make her wait to go on leave after the others had already gone, didn’t toss sarcastic remarks at her in the presence of other soldiers. Just the opposite, he was careful around her. Thought twice before asking her to do something for him, careful to sound as if he were making a request, not issuing an order. But the rides to Beit Hanan stopped. He didn’t offer anymore and she didn’t ask. And when they passed each other on the tiled paths connecting the huts, he would avert his eyes. So did she. Sometimes he really wanted to say something to her, but he didn’t know what.

After a few weeks, to his amazement, she asked for a transfer to a different section. He had no idea what reason she gave the unit commander. No one said a word to him, neither good nor bad. No one summoned him for a talk, put him on trial, or asked to hear their separate versions of the incident. One morning, she simply wasn’t there anymore.

He comes to the late conclusion that there was no way she didn’t recognize him. She recognized me, all right, but didn’t want to show me that she did. Bottom line, even though I’m right for the job, better than anyone else, there’s no way I’ll get an e-mail from the company within a week, two at the most. There’s no chance I’ll receive an e-mail as long as she’s their human resources manager.

Late Saturday night, an e-mail lands in his inbox. From her private address. The domain name wasn’t the company’s.

The subject: To Eli from Rotem—personal.

Right after he reads the first words, “Of course I recognized you,” he closes his laptop and makes his “shoe rounds.” Picks up all the scattered shoes and returns each pair to its owner’s room. His eldest daughter is still on the phone with a friend, and he reminds her that tomorrow’s a big day, so she shouldn’t go to sleep too late. Okay, Daddy, she says, and goes back to her phone conversation. Then he takes a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of his wife’s bag, returns to the study, and opens his laptop.

The next morning they take their daughter to the army recruiting office, the words from Rotem’s e-mail still echoing in his mind. Her side of the story was so different from the way he had imagined it.

They’re five in the car now, and it’s very noisy. In honor of the event, the new recruit is given the right to choose the soundtrack for the drive and she plays Enrique Iglesias songs on her phone. Nirit sheds a tear and the girls laugh at her for getting so emotional about every little thing. When they reach the recruiting office, it turns out that the younger girls had filled a bag with presents that will help their older sister get through her first night, and now they give it to her. The three of them cry and hug, and he and Nirit glow with pleasure as they watch from the sidelines. A moment before their daughter boards the bus, he finally manages to catch her alone for a few seconds. Take care of yourself, he says, putting a hand on her shoulder. Dad, I’m going into the Signal Corps, she says and laughs, what can possibly happen to me? An Arabic–Hebrew dictionary will fall on my head? No, really—he hugs her suddenly, too hard—take care of yourself, little girl. Okay, Daddy, she says, barely able to move out of his embrace, then adds with a smile, on the condition that you do too!

A week later, the official letter arrives. From her official e-mail address.

To Mr. Eli Goren,

We would like to thank you for applying to our company.

Unfortunately, after a careful evaluation of your CV and the information provided during your personal interview, we believe your profile does not suit our needs.

We wish you success in your future undertakings.

Sincerely,

Rotem Ashkenazi

Human Resources Manager

Do you dream about your characters?

There was a time when I did.

Today I dream that the members of BDS rise up as a single entity during my reading, climb onto the stage one by one, and murder me with a fountain pen while I desperately try to convince them that I have always been against the occupation and that the essence of my writing is an attempt to give a voice to the other.

Are you in favor of two countries for two peoples?

I don’t want to answer that question. I wrote books, I want to talk about my books. But I’m not naïve, I know how things work. It’s clear to me that the title of this interview will most likely be taken from my response to this question and not from my responses to other questions related to my books. I don’t understand why writers always have to be asked their opinion on political issues. Even after they’ve had a sleepless night because the wife came home late, very late, disturbingly late, from a night out with a friend, and also because recently, they have more question marks than exclamation points about everything related to current events, and most other things as well. But not all of us are Amos Oz. Not all of us are always fully prepared with a perfectly formulated reply to every question. Which doesn’t mean I won’t answer that question in the end, my way. Of course I’ll answer. Because more than I don’t feel like answering it, I don’t want people to think I’m avoiding the question.

Do you find yourself dealing with criticism when you’re abroad because you’re Israeli?

My father warned me. I can’t say he didn’t. I wrote to him from Singapore that the festival had sent a guy to escort me everywhere, and he replied: From my experience, he might be an agent with their secret police.

I wrote back: Don’t be silly. He’s a mild kind of guy. Nerdy. He writes poetry for his own pleasure.

And he replied: Maybe everything he says about himself is true. And maybe it isn’t.

My father worked in Singapore in the eighties. He advised the only university there on how to improve their screening processes, and was expelled from the country in disgrace after, in a private conversation, he expressed support for Singapore’s only opposition politician.

“In any case, I advise you to weigh your words carefully,” he wrote in the last text he sent me. But I—

I was intoxicated with the compliments I received there as an Israeli.

Usually, I shrivel when confronted with accusations. Admit to injustices. Watch sadly as BDS members leave the hall in open protest as I begin my talk. And suddenly—

Start-up nation. Jewish innovation. Nobel Prize sensation.

And the food. So many new tastes on my tongue! They have small open markets with food stands that sell only one dish each, but what a dish! And the liquor. They pour you something called a Singapore Sling, and after a few glasses you just—

Maybe it was because of the Singapore Sling that I spoke to my escort about democracy. Until then, I’d been careful about what I said, even when he himself complained about the regime (the price of cars, he kept saying, the price of cars), but after my fourth glass, I said: There’s no start-up nation without democracy. Every teacher who wants to encourage creativity and originality in his students knows that the first rule is to create an atmosphere of openness, tolerance, attentiveness in class, and, most important of all, zero awe.

You understand, I pontificated—

(Oh, the hubris. )

You can send a delegation to Israel and bring Israeli experts to advise you, that’s all well and good, but as long as you have only one party here, and one newspaper, you’ll never be able to be truly original. Do you understand? For creativity to exist, you need liberty.

That night, more specifically, at four thirty in the morning—

The door of my hotel room was flung open and two guys burst in with a large gun.

They were polite in the scariest way possible. According to them, they were there only to take me to my flight.

But gentlemen, I protested, my flight is in another two days! (How serious can the protest of a man in pajamas be?)

Your flight has been moved forward, said the taller one, who was still a head shorter than me, but he was the one with the gun, and I had six-year-old Shira and two-year-old Noam waiting for me at home.

So I did what they said.

Pack, they said. I packed.

(I remember throwing all my clothes haphazardly into my suitcase, and I felt they were contemptuous of me for it.)

Check to see that you haven’t left anything behind, they told me. I checked.

(I remember that my toothbrush was in the bathroom, in the soap holder. I took it.)

Please give us your passport, they said. I gave it to them.

(I remember sweat rolling down the back of my neck and being absorbed by my shirt.)

We walked through the hotel lobby—I carrying my suitcase and one of them on either side of me. The reception clerk buried his head in his keyboard. The doorman at the entrance held the door open long before we reached it.

I remember the drive to the airport. The silence in the car. I usually get people to talk. I always get people to talk. This time, there was clearly no chance. The car, which looked like a normal Hyundai, sailed through the roads of the city. We passed the botanic gardens and the tall skyscrapers that are joined together by a walkway that looks like a ship. An Israeli architect designed those breathtaking towers. Safdie. And everyone I met in Singapore mentioned Safdie’s aerial ship as another example of the creativity of the Jewish people.

Apart from my two companions, whose silence was anything but companionable.

They also remained silent as we skipped check-in and skirted security.

The first and last time they opened their mouths was at the passport check.

The tall one handed me my passport.

The short one took a piece of paper out of his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and read: “The Republic of Singapore thanks you for your visit and your contribution to our cultural enrichment and the breakthrough to new ways of thinking. Nonetheless, we wish it to be clear that any additional visit to our country by you or any member of your family is unwelcome and will be treated as such.”

(That was the first time anyone had hinted that the government had made the connection between me and my father. That, in fact, I had been marked from the first minute and someone had been assigned to follow me. But it took me a while to think about that. At that moment, all I wanted was to board the plane. Never in my life had I wanted so much to board a plane.)

Three hours after takeoff, my heart was still racing. The last time my heart had pounded that way was when Shira banged her head on the corner of the table and lost consciousness for a few seconds.

There were many Hebrew speakers on the plane, but I didn’t tell any of them the story of my expulsion. I think I temporarily lost my faith in people.

That escort, provided by the festival, was so open. Ostensibly.

He showed me his poems.

Poems about unrequited love. To a girl who left him for his best friend.

And several other poems, more original ones, in which he speaks on the phone with his dead father.

I don’t remember specifically, but I do remember the idea: Every year, on the son’s birthday, the father calls from the place of his death to say happy birthday and hear how he is. Every conversation has its own poem, and every poem reveals to us the changes that have occurred in the son’s life that year. And how, with time, he is becoming more like his father. Almost against his will.

You see, my escort had explained to me while we were still reading his notebook of poems, in our culture, the dividing line between life and death is more indistinct. Sometimes, it doesn’t even exist.

Damn it, I thought on the plane, how easy it is to put one over on me.

I took two sleeping pills and slept until we landed.

The first person I spoke to (I remember myself standing at the gift shop in the arrivals hall and putting the phone to my ear) was my father.

I warned you, he said.

You did.

So why did you rile them?

I didn’t think I was riling them, Dad. That guy, my escort—

Nerdy, writes poetry. I remember.

I never suspected for a single minute that—

Those are the people they choose for jobs like that, people who inspire trust.

Okay, the main thing is that I’m here, right Dad?

Right.

You know, all of a sudden I value the freedom of expression we have here.

Yes.

The fact that we can criticize freely, without fear.

For the time being.

Why “for the time being”?

Never mind. Should I come to pick you up, son?

No, it’s okay, I’ll take a taxi.

Call your mother after you’ve gotten organized, okay? But don’t tell her about the incident. Her heart is weak enough as it is.

The incident in Singapore occurred ten years ago, and I decided that I would never write or tell anyone about it. And so it remained banished from my life as if it were a leper.

But it isn’t only people who change with time. So do countries. I had a conversation a few hours ago. The literature teacher in the Itzhak Rabin High School in Ness Ziona called me. He began with compliments. Told me how excited the students were about the meeting with me the next day. Said they had prepared questions that he would print out for me. And then, after explaining where the best place to park was, he said, in a slightly tenser voice, Look, I have a request. More accurately, it’s a request from the administration that I ask you, if possible, to please not speak about controversial subjects. Politics, I mean. It’s better for all of us if you remain in the area code of literature. Family, love, childhood. You know. And you can save your criticism for more suitable opportunities. This is a rather sensitive time, you see. We’ve just asked the Ministry of Education for an addition to our budget. Apparently the supervisor, who is a personal friend of Minister Sirkin, will be present during your talk, and we don’t want to anger anyone now, of all times. You understand me, right?

My father warned me. I can’t say he didn’t.

I took a course with your father at the university. What is he doing these days? Can you send him regards from Hanita Brodetsky? I hope he remembers me.

My father still goes down to the beach on Saturdays at six in the morning, dear Hanita. He loves to swim in freezing water. I absolutely do not love to swim in freezing water, but when we spend a Saturday in Haifa, I go down to the beach with him because I like sitting in the Kadarim restaurant with him after his swim.

He had a heart attack when he was forty-nine. He survived and still plays basketball every Thursday, to this very day. But I still worry when he dives into the waves, and keep my eyes glued to him to make sure he doesn’t have another sudden heart attack in the middle of the sea. If I lose sight of him for more than a minute, I get really stressed, and once, a few years ago, I sent the lifeguard and everyone on the beach to look for him because I was terrified he had drowned, but it turned out that he had just swum to another beach.

These days, the sea is filled with jellyfish, so he doesn’t swim far out. And I can sit on the folding chair he always keeps in the car trunk—part of a full beach kit—and watch him snorkel in comfort. I have no idea why he swims in the Mediterranean Sea with a snorkel and mask, Dado Beach in Haifa isn’t exactly Ras Burqa in the Sinai, but I’ve learned to accept this just the way I learned to accept and love his other quirks: The fact that he keeps a motorcycle in the building parking lot without ever riding it. The fact that he spends entire Saturdays playing chess with himself. That he refuses to learn how to use Word and writes all his articles with a fountain pen. That his favorite vacation spot is Tiberias.

There were years when I resented my father. Quietly and persistently, I nursed my anger toward him. And poured all that bitterness into the fathers I created in my books. But when I became a father myself, most of his anger-provoking behavior seemed suddenly understandable: He sometimes doesn’t answer when you speak to him? That’s only human, his head is filled with worry about making a living. He travels abroad for long periods of time? Obviously. A person needs to take a break. Sets a standard of integrity that is too high to live up to? Better than having a criminal for a father. Is unable to remain in the here and now, and always has to worry about his future and that of everyone around him? Okay, that’s something about him that still drives me crazy.

People who knew him—former students, colleagues, or army buddies (not just you, Hanita)—always come up to me after lectures and say: You look so much like your father, you know? And I say: Thank you. Or: That’s a real compliment. But I still wince slightly, an internal, imperceptible wince. A person wants to believe that he has free will. Then they ask how he is, and you can sense in their tone how much respect and affection they have for him. And I reply, He’s great, thank you, and think to myself: I’m lucky to have him for a father.

My father comes out of the water now. His body looks like mine will look in thirty years. Only the scar on his chest from his surgery is still red, as if it were only yesterday that he was rushed to the hospital. He towels himself off. Puts on his glasses. Clips the sunshade on them. Gives me his wallet and says: Order us the regular?

When he comes back from the shower, the regular is already on the table: Two short espressos. Two soda waters. A plate of labane. A plate of hummus. A plate of pickled vegetables. A plate of sliced onions.

He sips his espresso and asks: So what do you hear from Shira’le?

I don’t hear anything from her, I want to say. She hasn’t spoken to me since she left, only to Dikla. But instead, I say: Everything’s good. She’s happy there at Sde Boker.

He wants to say: What kind of parents are you that your daughter ran away from you? What did you do to her? But instead, he says: That’s wonderful. Really wonderful.

He takes another sip of his espresso and asks: And how is Arieh?

For some reason, he always calls Ari “Arieh.” I don’t correct him anymore. Once, when I still had a lot of things, they both helped me move, and after we finished unpacking the last carton in the new apartment, my father invited us to a restaurant and ordered a second steak and another shashlik for Ari, patted him on the shoulder, and said, Eat, eat, you deserve it, you’re a good friend.

Not too great, I reply. I mean, the doctors aren’t…optimistic.

It’s a cruel disease, my father says with a sigh.

Yes, I say.

You visit him in the hospital, don’t you?

Of course, I say, he’s at home right now, so I visit him there.

It’s important, because…he says, and stops. He pulls off a piece of pita and dips it into the hummus. Which is suspicious. Usually, the hummus is mine and the labane is his. And he adds sugar to his espresso, which he also never does. Only then does he continue: I had a friend, I don’t know if I told you about him—

Mickey, I say his name to myself. And think: Grandpa told me, Grandma told me, Mom told me about your best friend who was killed in the Yom Kippur War—you’re the only one who never did.

Mickey was in my high-school class. He…was killed in the Chinese Farm battle. The Saturday before he was killed, we both went home on leave…he lived on a street parallel to mine. And I said I’d stop by to see him in the evening.

Yes.

But I didn’t.

Yes.

If you happened to hear this story from Grandma, she must have said that I fell asleep.

You didn’t?

I was just feeling lazy.

Yes, Dad.

So what I’m saying is, visit Ari. Another espresso?

No thanks, Dad. I can’t fall asleep at night as it is.

He called the waiter over and ordered another espresso. He never does that either, I think. He asks the waiter how he is. How it’s going in the university. The waiter is one of the owner’s sons, and since we started going there, he’s always been the one to take our order. Now he tells my dad about a bureaucratic problem he’s come up against at the university, and my dad gives him some advice. And writes down his phone number, in case he needs it. He’s always eager to help, my dad. He’s never nasty.

So why can’t you fall asleep, son? he asks when the waiter leaves. My mother once told me that one of the reasons she fell in love with him was his remarkable ability to return to a conversation at the exact—and I mean exact—moment it was broken off.

No real reason. I’m a light sleeper, you know.

Like your mother.

You have to know which traits to inherit from whom. Color blindness from you, and from her—

So tell me, is everything with Dikla okay?

Yes, of course, why? Because she doesn’t come to Haifa with us? You know Dikla, always busy.

That’s true, he says, sounding a tiny bit dubious. But dubious nevertheless. And I know that he suspects something is very much not all right between me and Dikla. Because how much can you hide from your parents, especially if they’re psychologists, and I know that now he’ll turn around to face the sea, giving me the space I need to begin telling him what happened. I suspect that Mickey’s story was a chess player’s maneuver meant to leave me open to this moment, and I know I can tell him that I’m in trouble—yesterday I told Dikla that nothing actually happened in Colombia, that I had made up the story of cheating because I felt she was moving away from me and I wanted to shake her up, and she looked at me for a long time and said: You’re screwed up, you know? All screwed up—and if I tell him that, I will have the benefit of his wisdom, his experience and kindness, his considered opinion, and all the qualities that put light in the eyes of the people who come up to me after my lectures—your eyes too, Hanita?—to speak about him. I know that he will be cautious and discreet about every intimate detail I reveal to him, he is very far from being a gossip. I also know that the window of opportunity here is narrow, because my Dad might be a psychologist but he is also a man of long silences, not a man who bulldozes, and in another minute, he’ll turn around from the sea, signal the waiter to bring the bill, and say, Mom is waiting for us, we should go back. I know all this, but nonetheless, say nothing.

Why, starting from a certain age, can’t we share anything important with our parents, Hanita? Is it because, as Genesis tells us “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife,” or is it just because we don’t want to worry or burden them? Or maybe we want to maintain the image of successful, thriving people we hope they see when they look at us? Then again, maybe I’m the only one who is silent with his father, Hanita, and as I write to you, millions of people in the world are sharing whatever is on their minds with their parents, without hesitation.

On the way back to the Carmel, we talked about Noam’s bat mitzvah and about movies. My father loves to go to the movies and then criticize them as if he is, at the very least, a newspaper movie reviewer. Action movies are the only ones he really loves, and that’s because they have no pretensions of being quality films.

In the end, I asked about you, Hanita. He doesn’t remember you, but don’t take offense. At home, my mother is responsible for the long-term memories, and when we got home and I asked her, she immediately said, Hanita Brodetsky, of course. She reminded him that you studied statistics with him and remembered who your boyfriend was, and she even remembered what you used to wear. In short, my parents send you their warm regards.

When will they produce a film adaptation of your latest book? When I read it, I could actually imagine the movie.

What a book! he said, shaking his head in disbelief. What a book!

Thank you.

I started reading it in the duty-free shop and couldn’t put it down for the whole flight.

Thank you, thank you very much.

The minute I finished it, I said to my wife: This is a movie.

Really?

She didn’t hear me, she fell asleep.

My wife sleeps on flights too.

Your writing is so…visual. And the dialogue? Pure pleasure.

I’m glad you think so.

Between you and me, we could start filming tomorrow.

Great.

There’s only one small thing.

Yes?

They’d probably have to move the story to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem?

Because of the Jerusalem Fund special grant for movies filmed in the city.

But—

And the heroine—would you object to her being German instead of Israeli?

Why?

It leaves the door open to a coproduction with the German company that worked with us on Springtime in Sobibor.

But—

Which, by the way, has just been accepted to the Cannes Film Festival.

Wonderful, but—

Do you have a suit and tie?

Yes, why?

You’ll need it to walk on the red carpet in another two years.

But—

I get the impression that something’s bothering you.

Actually, yes. How can the heroine be German if she meets the hero when they’re both in the Israeli navy?

Everything is fixable.

What do you mean?

Why do they have screenwriters if not to fix things like that?

I don’t see how scree—

Here’s an example: Germany sells submarines to Israel, right?

Let’s say it does.

So one day he’s standing on the pier and her submarine emerges from the water. Like Bo Derek.

Didn’t you say it takes place in Jerusalem?

Right, so there’s no problem at all. She comes to the Western Wall. He’s an army security guard there.

But—

And then we can get a development grant from the Cornucopia Fund.

The Cornucopia Fund?

They back films that have Jewish content.

But—

I hope it’s okay with you that I’ve already called Gal Gadot’s agents.

About what?

What do you mean, “about what”? About the lead role. I sent them the book.

But—

You know how much it will help market the movie if she agrees to star in it?

But…the heroine is…small and shy.

She was small and shy. In the book.

And in the movie?

She’ll be Gal Gadot.

I don’t know.

What is there not to know?

I feel that the connection between the book and the movie is getting weaker.

You want to drink something?

No thanks.

Excuse me for saying it like this, you know, straight out, but you have to loosen up.

Loosen up?

Cinema, it’s a different kind of art. It has its own rules.

Yes, but—

We once worked with that kind of writer, faithful to the source. You don’t want to know how it ended.

So what is it that you’re actually proposing?

Go home, sleep on it, and come by tomorrow to sign a contract.

I’m not sure that—

Ah, yes, another thing.

What?

The title.

What’s wrong with the title?

Would you buy a ticket to a movie called Osmosis?

What’s wrong with Osmosis?

Half the people don’t know what it means. And for the ones who do know, it sounds scary.

So what do you suggest?

I’m not suggesting anything, the focus group suggested it.

Focus group?

What’s with you? You can’t find a single movie in the market today that didn’t have its title checked first by a focus group.

Okay—

Operation Love.

Excuse me?

That’s the name they picked. The company that organizes focus groups for us said there wasn’t a single objection. They haven’t had such a unanimous focus-group decision for a long time.

But what’s the connection between the title and the—

There’s love in your book?

Yes.

There’s a military operation in it?

An unsuccessful military operation.

What difference does it make?

Friendly fire. It’s a…political statement.

Friendly fire during an operation or not during an operation?

During an operation.

I’m glad you’re happy with the title.

But—

I want you to feel part of the process.

I—

And also, it’s important that, when you’re interviewed, you say how pleased you are.

Pleased?

That although a movie is not a book, it’s a different art form with its own rules, but even so.

Even so?

The creators succeeded in preserving…the spirit of the book.

Listen—

You found yourself laughing, crying, falling in love with Gal Gadot.

How do I know what I’ll feel? I haven’t seen anything yet!

It doesn’t matter what you feel. As far as I’m concerned, you can hate the movie. What counts is what you say in interviews.

But—

A writer who doesn’t take part in public relations for the movie is sending critics the message that he’s not happy with the adaptation. And if there’s something the critics know how to sniff out, it’s blood. You don’t want to open the morning newspaper and see that they slaughtered us, right?

Right.

In the end, our success is your success. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you.

I understand.

Flexibility is the name of the game.

Okay.

You’re sure you don’t want something to drink?

No thanks.

Coffee? Tea? Water? You look a little pale.

Maybe water.

Your book really is huge, I want you to know that.

Thank you.

I started reading it in the duty-free shop and couldn’t put it down for the whole flight.

Thank you, thank you very much.

The minute I finished it, I said to my wife: This is a movie!

Do you believe that, as a writer, you are obligated to be involved in politics?

I meet with Michael Orbach, my American acquaintance. He’s almost twenty years older than me, but he has fewer white hairs, and his gait, as we walk along the beach promenade toward Jaffa, is lighter. We met in another life, when I worked as a copywriter for an ad agency. Michael ran a workshop for us on social advertising, or as he called it, Meaningful Advertising, and when he lectured, I felt as if I were seeing the light. It turns out that it’s possible to work in advertising without making a mockery of yourself. You can write slogans, radio spots, and scripts for worthy causes. You can use advertising techniques to encourage people to make significant changes in their lives instead of urging them to buy things they don’t need.

I went up to him after the lecture. Mr. Orbach, I said, your words have inspired me.

I said, I’d like to join your company. Work with you. Maybe as a representative of Meaningful Advertising in Israel. What do you think?

He said I should send him my CV.

I sent it. He replied politely that, at the moment, he wasn’t looking for new staff members, but he would keep my CV on file.

I wrote back that I know that what he said means is no in American, and asked if we could occasionally e-mail, because working in an ad agency had made me feel that my words were losing meaning.

We began to correspond. Exchange ideas. More accurately, I asked his advice on a series of subjects and he taught me a few things.

Every now and then, I would ask about the possibility of working with him. My days in the agency had become increasingly bleak during that period. As the municipal elections grew closer, a subsidiary company to handle political advertising was established in the office, and I was assigned to it for three months. We were supporting mayoral candidates throughout the country. Billboards. Radio spots. Party platforms.

One of the candidates was Yoram Sirkin. THE Yoram Sirkin.

I remember the first time I saw him. The ironic thing was that I wasn’t supposed to be at that meeting at all. I had a deadline to produce a jingle for another campaign, but they took me off it and suddenly called me into the conference room. This is our copywriter, the big boss introduced me when I walked in, and then pointed to the other side of the table and said, Meet Yoram Sirkin, the next mayor. The three men sitting at the other side of the table were more or less the same age. None of them had the charismatic presence of a future mayor, so I didn’t know which of them to look at, but I said to myself, It’s definitely not the one on the left, because the minute the big boss said, the next mayor, the one on the left averted his eyes in embarrassment. Altogether, there was something saggy about him. His shoulders sagged, his shirt sagged, and so did his glasses.

But the guy on the left spoke first. His voice was slightly nasal and he paused in the wrong places between…words: I asked for you to come into…the room because it…was important to…me that you…join our campaign and see eye to eye with…us. No wisecracks, the kind ad…agency people like. You understand what I’m…saying?

Completely. What do you think about seeing heart to heart? I asked.

The room suddenly filled with a should-we-laugh-or-cry silence.

Good one, Yoram Sirkin said, touching the bridge of his glasses lightly. Taking their cue from him, his two escorts nodded.

The thing about a political campaign—I continued as if I were an expert on the subject—is to arouse the voters’ emotions. To find the right buttons and press them. Over and over again.

What did you say your name was? Sirkin asked. And before I could reply, he turned to the boss and said, I want this kid to…be with us at every meeting from now…on. I like the way his mind…works.

The official purpose of the next few meetings was to learn our candidate’s agenda, to find out what he wanted to promote, what he believed in, and what his plan of action would be—if he won the election. But Yoram Sirkin answered almost every question we asked with the same question: What do you think would go over well with the voters? I believe that, with the exception of his intense desire to be elected, he had no other clear aspirations. We replied cautiously that we should wait for the reports of the focus groups, and until we received them, anything we said about voters’ preferences would be guesswork.

Yoram Sirkin nodded, and then, for the first time, made the gesture that would become the trademark of comedians imitating him in political satires on TV years later: rubbing his hands together as if he were performing the commandment of washing his hands before a meal.

The focus group concluded that the residents were quite satisfied with their city and more than anything, were afraid that a new mayor would change the way things were being done.

If that’s the situation, I said at the next meeting, let’s go all the way with it. Let’s tell people to vote for our candidate because he’s the only one who definitely won’t change anything.

Good one, Yoram Sirkin said.

We flooded the streets with billboards that showed a large, nicely photoshopped picture of him—the glasses were gone and his evasive glance became an intense, direct stare—along with the fruit of my keyboard: Sirkin. Only he can preserve our city.

At the same time, we hired a language coach to teach him how to speak before an audience. We didn’t delude ourselves that he would become a firebrand overnight, but we asked her to work with him on his…pauses. Polls all over the world show that candidates who win elections are those who know how to pause in the right places.

When the campaign opened, the polls gave Sirkin four to five percent of the vote. But he was faithful to the list of messages prepared for him, and repeated them like a parrot in a cage: We love our city the way it is. Every change is risky. The risk is greater than the chance of success. If it’s not broken, why fix it? If it’s fixed, why break it?

Meanwhile, the candidate leading in the polls, a brigadier general in the reserves, was accused of sexual harassment and dropped out of the race.

We eliminated a third candidate with a negative campaign that placed in voters’ minds the totally fabricated notion that he had ties with real estate sharks and would push for construction that would change the character of the city and lower property values.

From week to week, Sirkin’s numbers rose another little bit in the polls. And another little bit. What is known in the professional jargon as gathering momentum. At the same time, and to our great surprise, his body language changed. Suddenly, he walked briskly, suddenly, his movements were sharp. Suddenly, he banged on the table: Get me the ultra-Orthodox!

And the ultra-Orthodox came to the office and closed a deal to support him in the election in exchange for future budget allotments.

On election night, at our headquarters and in the presence of a modest audience that included mostly members of his family, we celebrated Yoram Sirkin’s victory in the mayoral race, never suspecting that it was only the first stop in his meteoric rise in politics.

The agency’s subsidiary was dissolved immediately after the municipal elections.

A month later, I received a call on my personal phone from the new mayor.

Listen, kid, he said, I have to give a speech at the municipal education conference.

Okay.

I thought maybe you could…write a…few points for…me. A few killer sentences.

But…I thought our office doesn’t handle your account anymore.

Tell me, kid, why should they make any money on me…or you? Work directly with me. As a consultant.

Let me think about it, Yoram, okay?

Okay. But the education conference is…tomorrow. Don’t think too…much.

I always knew that copywriting was a hollow profession. Only when my path crossed Yoram Sirkin’s did I understand that it was also corrupt. That I myself was already corrupt from so many years in the profession.

But I didn’t know how to do anything else.

I hoped that Uncle Michael from America would rescue me from the predicament I was in. I waited for his e-mails the way children wait for the Independence Day fireworks. And he wrote the same reply every time: Of course, the minute I have a job to offer you, I will. Let’s meet and talk about it the next time I’m in Israel.

We met when he came to Israel to run his workshops. We walked along the beach promenade from the InterContinental David, to the marina, and back through Jaffa. Always the same route. And he was always the one who spoke. I mean—lectured. About the mistakes in the last Labor Party election campaign. About the fact that the left wing in Israel didn’t have to build its campaign around fear, like its right-wing opponents, but should base it on hope. About the fact that Herzl’s dream was to establish a country for the Jews, and now that it has been established, we have to redefine Zionism, fill it with up-to-date content, otherwise it will remain hollow, and that hollowness will fill up with right-wing, Messianic elements.

Between one political prophecy and another, he also distracted me with advice in other areas: Start a family as quickly as possible, kiddo. Marriage isn’t a prison, the way people mistakenly think, it’s the freedom to stop searching for love. But you have to choose right, son, and the criterion is flexibility. A flexible partner is the key to happiness, and children—having children is the most creative thing a person can do in his life, children enrich your creativity, they don’t damage it, trust me—

I trusted him. I felt I was learning so much from him.

On one of those walks, he told me in the same arrogant, know-it-all tone he typically used that he had closed his New York office and fired all the employees. Meaningful Advertising, the company, was not very profitable. And he was up to his ears in debt. So now he worked alone, mainly giving workshops in order to pay his debtors. A person needs to take responsibility for his failures, he said, otherwise there’s no way he can succeed.

He didn’t see any contradiction between his collapse and the fact that he continued to give others advice. There was something both ridiculous and impressive about that.

A few months later, I left the ad agency and began to write. I paid the rent by writing speeches for Yoram Sirkin. I no longer needed an uncle in America, and he didn’t have any practical prospects for me anyway. Nevertheless, maybe out of habit or because we were both sociable people who, deep inside, felt chronically lonely, we kept meeting every once in a while to stroll along the beach promenade.

Now we’re walking toward Jaffa once again. He has just finished giving a workshop for the directors of human rights organizations in Israel, and he’s upset. It doesn’t matter how crappy your governments have been, he says, the people were always optimistic. That’s why I loved coming here. Your anthem is called “The Hope,” and that’s what there always was here: hope. But today—today I gave a workshop to a group of hopeless people. What happened to all of you?

Look, I begin—

And he interrupts me.

I read your last book, by the way. The translation is excellent. And the characters—they actually jump off the page. Forgive me for saying this, but I kept thinking, how can you write such a naïve love story that could take place anywhere, and be blind to the fact that the country you live in is causing so much suffering in the occupied territories? How can you write about a trivial love affair when women are giving birth at checkpoints?

Look, I try—

And he interrupts me.

You know what the problem is? That people like you go into art instead of politics. And people like—what’s his name? Sirking? Sirkind?—are government ministers and legitimate candidates to lead the country. Do you get it? Your government lets you write books, make movies. What do they care? You can walk on the red carpet in Cannes. You can win at fucking Sundance. You can sell formats to HBO. It’s all fine just as long as you don’t get in the way of their building settlements and destroying the Zionist enterprise, right?

But—

A person like you, with your family background, has to ask himself at every moment whether he’s doing the most meaningful thing he can. Write another best seller? Come on. You can do better.

I have an answer for him. But for the last few weeks, there’s been so much tension at home between me and Dikla that I don’t have the strength to argue with someone else now. And I think that, this time, there’s something else underneath his typical heat-of-the-argument reversal. Something more personal he’s going through.

It comes out as we pass Manta Ray restaurant.

His wife is leaving him.

They spent their lives waiting for this time to come. The kids left for college and now they would have time to make their dreams come true, the dreams they had to push aside in order to be parents. And now his wife does want to make those dreams come true. But not with him.

I nod in understanding. That was the first time in our history that he told me something really personal. I wonder whether I should put a hand on his shoulder. But I don’t dare. And I wonder whether to tell him that, last week, Dikla stopped getting dressed when I’m in the room, and doubts every little thing I tell her. Whether I really sent the advance payment to the hall we hired for the bat mitzvah, whether I’m really starting to give the creative writing workshop on Thursday evenings in Beit Shemesh, whether—

Right before Jaffa, he collapses totally.

On a bench.

I sit down next to him.

Surfers walk down to the sea with their boards.

Surfers come up from the sea with their boards.

Wild is the wind.

It happened so quickly, he says in bewilderment.

One evening—“We have to talk.” Then a confession. Well-phrased. As if she had polished it for weeks. Thank you for all the good years, but I think that we should separate before it turns really ugly, she told him. The next day, she took her things and moved into a rented apartment. Which means she rented the apartment before she spoke to him. Would you believe it?

A sixty-something American man is now leaving me space to say something wise that will comfort him. Give him some insight. But my life experience is so meager compared to his that I feel all I can do for him is listen.

I’m completely lost, he says. There’s a story I used to tell myself about my life—and it turns out that it’s wrong. And I have no fucking idea where to go from here.

The three-card monte con man sets up next to us, this is his regular place on the promenade. His cronies gather around his box, but the fierce wind blows the three cards away—only one of them is the jack—and the con man and his cronies run after them to try and catch them.

How about eating at Dr. Shakshuka? I finally say.

My American friend laughs. He’s crazy about shakshuka.

As long as a person keeps his sense of humor and his appetite, I think, there’s a chance he can be saved. We head for the Clock Tower, the wind has died down a little, and I notice that he’s slightly stooped and has slowed down. Usually I have a hard time keeping up with him when we walk, but now I have to slow down so we can stay close. Right before the entrance to Dr. Shakshuka, he stops, straightens up, and puts a hand on my shoulder. Partly patronizing. Partly to keep himself from falling. Think about what I said about politics, he says. If people like you continue to stay on the sidelines, you won’t have a country left or sidelines you can stand on.

On the way back from my walk with my uncle from America, I see a billboard. It happens while I’m speeding along the Ayalon highway, so I have only a second to look. It’s enough to register Yoram Sirkin’s face and read my slogan: Sirkin. Only he can save our country.

What doesn’t the general public know about you?

Not only the general public. Dikla doesn’t know either that my relationship with Yoram Sirkin continued for years, and is continuing secretly to this day. My fingers tremble as I write this, and I’m not sure I’ll have the courage to press Save after typing these lines, but it’s the truth: I was there. At every step up Sirkin took. I’m the one who wrote the speech that propelled him into public consciousness, the one he delivered after a rocket hit a building in his city. The sentence “The best defense against a Quassam is the solidarity of our people”—it’s mine. When, after the war, he decided to run in the national primaries, he hired an ad agency for the sake of appearances, but kept buying slogans from me on the side. I never believed that, with the help of my slogans, he would climb high enough on the list of candidates to win a Knesset seat. I never believed that you could lie to everyone, all the time. And I certainly never thought that, during his first term in the Knesset, they would begin talking about him as a candidate for the cabinet.

That was when I tried to end my dealings with him. I arranged an appointment with him. In a failing café in Kiryat Ono. I asked him to come alone. He said: You need money, kid? Is that what this is about? Because if you do, just say the word. That’s not the issue, I said (money has never been the issue, the issue is having influence, the issue is hearing words I wrote echoing in the public space, the issue is that the influence and the echo are intoxicating).

Even in the failing café in Kiryat Ono, Yoram Sirkin’s entrance caused a small commotion. The barman asked to shake his hand. The waitress wanted to take a selfie with him. And so did the stoned guy who worked in the adjacent kiosk. I watched him as he gave them his all. The last few years, I’ve seen him only on TV. We communicated only by well-coded e-mail. It turns out that there are things you can’t see on TV. The small potbelly he’d grown, along with the suit he was wearing, gave him a more authoritative air. He really wasn’t wearing glasses anymore, probably laser surgery, which enabled him to look directly at anyone speaking to him. He moved around nimbly, purposefully, and his face looked tan and healthy. As if he had been photoshopped.

In the end, it happened, I thought as he approached my table: Yoram Sirkin has stepped into the shoes of the image I created for him. The fiction had solidified into reality. The puppet had cut its strings. The parrot had spread its wings, broken out of its cage, and taken off.

What’s up, kid? he said, sitting down and signaling for the waiter. What’s happening in the world of literature? You’re a disappearing world, believe me.

Listen, Yoram—I got straight to the point—I want to stop.

Stop what?

Working for you. Writing for you.

Okay. Can I ask why?

It doesn’t work for me anymore. You and I really don’t see eye to eye, ideologically, you know, recently—

But we’re a great success, kid.

You are, Yoram. Maybe a little too great.

So the golem turns on its creator, eh?

Something like that.

Do I look like a golem to you?

No, Yoram, of course not, definitely not—

Waiter! he shouted suddenly.

The waiter hurried over, looking apologetic, and took our order.

When he left our table, Yoram said, Listen to me and listen well, and rubbed his hands together as if he were performing the hand-washing mitzvah. He spoke quietly, which is what made it so alarming.

Yoram Sirkin doesn’t force anyone to work with him. But take into account that if you cut ties with me now, when I need you most, there will be a price.

A price?

I have all your e-mails, kid. One click on Forward, and you’re finished.

Let me get this straight, you’re threatening me?

Just the opposite, kid. I’m watching out for you. How do you think people in your milieu will react if they know you’ve been working for the other side? And with your family history? What will they write in that left-wing newspaper of yours? I can imagine the headline—

No need.

There’s a Conference of Presidents, next week, kid. In New York.

I don’t know, Yoram. Let me think about it.

I only need you to write the opening and closing of the speech. No one listens to the middle anyway.

In English?

Of course in English. Obama will be there. Bill Clinton. Members of Congress. Henry Kissinger. And…your faithful servant.

He’s learned where to put the pauses, I thought.

Waiter! he shouted and rubbed his hands together once again. When the waiter arrived, he handed him his phone and asked him to snap a picture of us. “As a souvenir.”

Only when the camera flashed did I realize: Our picture. Together. In a café. He’d send it to the media. A picture is worth a thousand e-mails.

I wrote the Conference of Presidents speech for him. The one that made the analysts begin to talk about him as candidate for party leader.