He tried the handle and found the door unlocked. For a moment he wondered if they were back, then he took a few steps and stood in the entryway. All the lights were on inside, and the blinds were drawn. The floor was strewn with clothes, books, dishes and glasses, Coke and Absolut Vodka bottles, pizza boxes, ashtrays overflowing with butts, and pieces of the white vase that had stood on the piano, one of which was stained with three drops of a blackish-purple liquid that appeared to be blood. He also saw muddy footprints, toilet paper rolls, LP and CD covers. He walked over the debris, tripping on a little heap every so often.
The house was icy. Searching for the kerosene heater in the mess, he heard a crack beneath his feet and looked down to see that he’d broken Bruce Springsteen Live. He took his clothes off and kicked them in a pile toward the washing machine on the little balcony. Shivering, he ran barefoot to the bathroom and wrapped a damp towel around his body. He hurried to his parents’ room: the sheets and blankets were tangled up on the floor, and he turned on the space heater that sat on a stool next to his mother’s side of the bed, picked up a blanket, lay down on the mattress and covered himself. He was still shaking, but the warm air slowly restored ease to his body, and he felt better.
In his mind’s eye he saw two pictures: in the first he walked his parents downstairs with their suitcases, and in the second he took his father to the airport, alone. The two pictures were mismatched—when exactly had they left? He heard a whistle, which seemed to emerge from within him, and he felt terrified. The soul’s responses are usually as familiar as the furniture in one’s childhood room—even in moments of anxiety you roam through a recognizable set of contours—but this prolonged whistle, like a new and frightening stab to his stomach, was something he had never heard before. He hoped he was not really hearing anything, or, conversely, that the whistle was in fact a familiar sound that he would soon identify. It gradually faded, leaving behind only faint echoes, as though it had split off into dozens of whistle-shards. He took air in and out, and felt something peculiar and unrecognizable blazing inside him. If he were to sleep here, in the only apartment he’d known since he was a baby, if he were to fall asleep in his parents’ bed with the heater blowing warm air on his body, perhaps things would go back to the way they were.
When he awoke at 9:45 a.m. he found a phone message from his aunt, who said she hoped he was “taking care of the house.” Last week she’d turned up with her son, a college student five years older than Yonatan, and they’d scrubbed the whole place in preparation for his parents’ return from New York. “I’ve never seen such a pigsty in my life,” she’d scolded him, and the rest of the time she’d barely said a word. He’d sprawled on the black armchair in the living room, smoked a cigarette and watched them scurry back and forth carrying piles of trash, Diet Coke bottles full of butts, glasses and plates containing remnants of pizza, falafel streaked with tahini, and chicken bones. He’d heard the vacuum cleaner, the washing machine, and taps running, he’d heard his aunt and cousin humming along with Shlomo Artzi on the radio, seen them mopping the floor, piling up more and more bags and cardboard boxes full of garbage.
Their accusatory silence did not touch him. This was not what they were blaming him for anyway—that while his mother hung at death’s door in New York he had the audacity to make such a mess of the apartment. That did anger them, but his real crime—that his mother had cancer partly because of the torments he had put her through—was one they never voiced. Sometimes they said things like, “You have to be kind to her now,” or “You’ll need to behave differently from now on, you’re almost eighteen,” but they did not mention whatever he’d done to accelerate her disease. Yet whenever anyone spoke of his mother’s illness, he knew that was what they believed.
He once shared his feelings with Yoel, who stared at him as though such a notion had never entered his mind. Yoel believed his mother loved Yonatan and their relationship was special even if things had grown complicated because of her illness. Yonatan had felt grateful because the surprise on Yoel’s face melted away his fear that perhaps, deep down, Yoel believed, as they all did, that he was guilty. He wanted to say to him then, “You and me, we’ve been making up stories forever. Can we even still talk about this world?”
His aunt asked him to leave the living room so they could clean up the rat’s nest he’d left there, and she couldn’t resist asking: “What on earth would you have done if we hadn’t come over?”
“Not a fucking thing,” he replied cheerfully. “That’s what.” Out of the corner of his eye he could see her son debating whether or not to intervene.
Yonatan got up off the couch and edged along the hallway so he wouldn’t get footprints on the wet floor, lay down on his bed and fell asleep. When he woke up he was fully clothed, wearing a coat and shoes. Someone had turned on the space heater in his room, and there was a message on the answering machine from his father informing him that they were staying in New York for another ten days. The doctors they’d pinned their hopes on had decided to start a new series of treatments. Yonatan wondered if his aunt already knew that all her hard work had been in vain.
He washed his face and hair and drove to school in the filthy white Daihatsu. He listened to “Girlfriend in a Coma” and felt like laughing. He pictured Lior, and was struck by an urge to go somewhere else, to drive to Lior’s school and wait outside until she came out, the way he used to when they were together. Sometimes Tali came out with her and the three of them would get in the car and the girls would say, “Let’s go to Ein Karem and take the old route to Tel Aviv,” and they’d speed up, get lost, find new roads and listen to music, and in the afternoon they’d lie on the rooftop of Lior’s apartment building and smoke cigarettes until evening fell.
He got to school at the end of first recess, walked past the smokers loitering outside and his classmates sitting on the benches above the radiators. They all seemed to be wearing black or blue sweaters and blue or gray jeans and speaking softly. Yoel had pronounced the smokers and bench-sitters “castrated puritans” and said he was willing to bet there wasn’t a single kid in their class who really knew how to enjoy sex. He said all the girls liked to believe they were rule-breakers, gazing longingly at the scruffy guitar player from Jerusalem’s punk band and insisting they’d love to give him a hand job, and that they sometimes went to a nightclub in Tel Aviv with black lipstick on and made out in the bathroom with gay DJs from the army radio station, but that in fact they were unimaginative puritans. Yoel also claimed that all the boys who went on aimless pub crawls downtown with the same people over and over again, or grew their hair long and bought earrings from a stand in Cats Square, and read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or the first eight pages of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to pay off their debt to existentialism, and talked about drugs they had no idea how to get hold of and finished off the evening over a slice of pizza before running home to jerk off to a gorgeous waitress from one of the trendy bars—that they were worse (Yonatan assumed this was not the right moment to tell Yoel that he’d recently fallen slightly in love with the black-haired waitress from Glasnost whose green eyes turned gray as the night wore on), and were so dumb that even now, midway through their senior year, they still hadn’t grasped that they’d wasted their youth.
He looked around but Yoel wasn’t there. That wasn’t surprising, given that he’d recently befriended a different group of kids. A lot of kids at school sought out Yoel’s company these days, boys and girls, and maybe that was why he’d been hinting that it was time to dismantle their kingdom. Yonatan had been feeling for a while that he was clinging on even as Yoel drifted away, and that, even if he didn’t want it to be over, he had to acknowledge the cruel law they had enacted together as children: the minute one of them lost interest, the world they had created together would disappear. Betrayal had always hovered over all their joint enterprises.
They had spent the past two years—since the end of sophomore year—constructing the kingdom, laboring over all its cities and governments, appointing ministers, governors and landowners, all of whose names were borrowed from their classmates. They concocted its pivotal events. Their kingdom had no name, nor did it exist in a particular time. It had a seventeenth-century sensibility, with occasional forays into the future, as when they invented a laser bomb that could implant other people’s fears into someone’s mind. Its annals were written on notes they passed back and forth in class. Yoel was Warshovsky, the great rebel whose entire family had been murdered by the king’s father. Warshovsky assembled an army of foreign soldiers, and after a bloody war in which the heir to the throne was killed, he formed an alliance with the king and became his Captain of the Guard. Yonatan was the king. Together they drew maps, too, detailing the towns and districts and battlefields. Every new episode began with a note:
“Problem: the wealthy Liptzin is demanding that we stop levying taxes on his lands. As Captain of the Guard it has come to my attention that other landowners may join his demand. He may have enlisted a small army. How should we handle him?”
“It’s time to take care of Liptzin and his crooked iron hand. He’s a little fucker playing at pirates. For too long we have idly sat back. Do you believe the army is prepared to take City No. One? Is that fucking loser of a governor with us?”
“You appointed that amateur!”
“Me? He’s your brother.”
“A distant brother. Not the same mother. You appointed him because you wanted his wife.”
“Who told you that?”
“You did!”
“Warshovsky, I’ve been informed that Berkowitz has taken over District Seven. I’m extremely disappointed—you got all the aid you demanded. I fired that amateur Yaron Hemo as per your demand and we still lost our only district with a port.”
“It was just a retreat into District Y.”
“You’re in District Y? Humans aren’t supposed to be there. District Y is only for the dead we allowed to become undead.”
“And the dead don’t eat, right? So the land is enough for the soldiers to live on. Berkowitz’s troops are spread out all over District Seven. Liptzin will join forces with her. I’m maneuvering them to stay there as long as possible, we’ve heard they’re practically freezing to death, their supplies won’t last more than two weeks: I’m slamming them with a nineteen-forty-two-style Eastern Front! It’s a good thing that pair’s greatest intellectual experience is watching sketch comedy on TV. Stop listening to all your amateur advisors. Go smell the flowers outside and leave the job to the professionals.”
“You have one month to complete the mission.”
“I don’t take orders from you.”
“But I’m the king!”
“You’re a puppet king. The army is behind me.”
In the tenth grade, when they’d started writing the kingdom’s history, before Yoel became popular in school, Yonatan suspected they were projecting their desire to climb up the social ladder onto their fictional land, infusing it with their rage at the popular cliques, which they viewed with contempt yet secretly wanted to join. Girls and boys they disliked were hanged, thrown off water towers or castle ramparts, had their hands, feet or heads chopped off, were appointed minor ministers, or simply exiled. If a girl they hated showed kindness to one of them, he would start showering her with honorary titles, leaving the other to puzzle over the sudden change. The entire kingdom was quite possibly a macabre map of their relationships with other kids, which they themselves did not thoroughly understand.
They desperately tried to believe that they wanted to be outside the school society they looked down on—all those pathetic, dreary kids who read boring old-people’s novels and dressed like their parents and couldn’t even see how gray and stifling everything was—but the truth was that they themselves were pretty tame, a fact they were repeatedly disappointed to discover. There were days when they came home from school with their backpacks full of crumpled notes covered with tiny, crowded, White-Out-smeared handwriting alongside pencil-drawn maps.
The kingdom was a place that could absorb all their ideas, a domain that lived somewhere between history, which Yoel liked, and imagination—mostly Yonatan’s. But lately events had begun to follow a hackneyed formula, with more wars and ceasefires, more uprisings and exiles, and Yoel seemed to be losing interest, cutting off plotlines with terse notes that left no room for response. He said everything was getting too dramatic, the game lacked humor and lightness. Yonatan did not believe he would have the courage to put an end to the whole story, until the day when Warshovsky announced that he was retiring to his estate, where he would live out the rest of his days in peace.
When Yonatan came home from school the next day, he lay down on his parents’ bed and fell asleep. He woke up when the phone rang. It was evening, and he could hear the crickets chirping in the wadi. Without any small talk, his father asked him to write a letter to his mother: the weeks in New York were passing, and she was suffering terribly from her treatments, yet she still talked about Yonatan all the time and worried about him being at home on his own for so long. He did not entirely believe his father. His father said the treatments took place every morning and they spent their afternoons in the hotel, usually just the two of them (sometimes his older brother visited), watching their favorite old movies: For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Best Years of Our Lives, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Gone with the Wind, The Last Picture Show, The Deer Hunter.
“But are the treatments helping?” Yonatan asked.
“I hope so,” said his father.
He hadn’t been expecting this gruff tone, which amplified the doubts and sounded too natural, as though his father were discussing his mother’s illness with another adult. Yonatan often protected himself inside a fortress of childhood, using its defensive walls to ward off bad news from the adult world—as well as its messengers. All he wanted to hear now were the lines they had always fed him, about how the situation was complicated, how her condition was discovered quite late, but of course the treatments would help. He always knew that there were details he avoided, content to skip over them as he did cracks in the sidewalk when he was a child. Didn’t every game have its own rules, wasn’t every arrangement based on certain laws?
On the rare occasions when he did gather up the courage to ask about his mother’s illness directly, the answers had never deviated from the predictable formula: vaguely hopeful platitudes. But now his father had abandoned his old tone and the delicate language they’d cultivated together, which, while it did not refute the disease, did not plumb its depths either, using generalizations that spoke in code even when they did not hide a complicated truth—locked doors to nowhere. Sometimes his mother violated this unwritten agreement and told Yonatan that the day would come when he would “visit her grave and place flowers on it,” but he put this down to the hardships of the illness, whose details she herself was loath to discuss.
His father coughed, and for an instant Yonatan imagined he could hear another voice, perhaps his mother’s or just someone on the TV in their hotel room. He swallowed, and pictured his throat filling up with thick, congealing fluid; Yoel and he had a name for that: “ant porridge dancing in your throat.”
“But the treatments are helping,” Yonatan insisted in a hoarse voice. He knew he sounded like a fucking coward—will help, are helping, should help. Just like Lior with her constant “Is your mom okay?” refrain. He would have given anything for Lior to be there now and say something to him. His knees wouldn’t stop moving, he couldn’t steady them, and he leaned on the wall by the black telephone armchair.
“I really hope so.”
For a moment Yonatan imagined he could see the world through his father’s eyes and he remembered how they used to hug. But then he was overcome with anger: these were not the right answers, his father must understand that.
“I know it’ll be okay,” Yonatan insisted again and his voice cracked.
“Let’s hope it will.”
There was another silence, and Yonatan believed he had decoded his father’s real request: “Write Mom a farewell letter.” From the moment that notion glowed in his mind, he feared he would not be able to remove it. His gaze crossed the darkness of the living room, perhaps the darkness of the years they had shared, and he was now hurtling through a tunnel, where every so often pictures he did not have time to decipher flickered on the walls. Even when he had contemplated his mother’s death, he’d mistrusted the pictures he saw, perhaps conjuring them up because he didn’t really believe in them.
“I don’t understand,” he insisted, “what do you want me to write?” He chased down the words, struggling to grasp them and the answers they sought. He said nothing more, but they both understood, and the weight of the unsaid words—a vision of this home in a few years, if they were even still living there—settled between them. Still silent, their breaths mingled. They had never spoken on the phone for this long. His father was an impatient man, and Yonatan hoped he would hurry up and say, “We’ll talk tomorrow.” Instead, he seemed to cling to this moment, and Yonatan found that terrifying: had his father been so depleted in New York that he was turning to him for comfort? This was how everything collapsed, he thought: a whole world, furnished with hopes and habits, emptied out in an instant, leaving only the fear.
Then his father seemed to break the spell. “Just write her a nice letter, I’m not asking for much,” he barked in the same voice he used when he affectionately scolded Yonatan for being mischievous, usually at the request of Yonatan’s mother, even when he himself viewed the prank as the sort of thing boys were supposed to do so they could toughen up ahead of real rewards and punishments. The instruction sketched the familiar outline of life, and, even though he had forced it out of his father, Yonatan felt relieved.
“Are you taking care of the house?” his father asked.
“Of course.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Are you studying?”
“Of course.”
“You’re not doing anything, are you?”
“I’m doing lots of things.”
“Are you studying for your finals?”
“We don’t have finals. They don’t do that anymore.”
“Are you talking with the family?”
“What family?”
“All right,” his father said.
“I’m going away on Friday,” Yonatan said.
“Where to?”
“Tel Aviv. To visit Yaara.”
His father paused; the idea of him going to see Yaara probably sounded odd, but either he was too exhausted to interrogate him, or, more likely, he simply didn’t believe him.
“But let them know you’re coming,” his father said in a commanding tone, “and say hello from us to everyone there.”
“All right, Dad.”
He was sweating. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them the house was cloaked in a vivid darkness like the wadi at night. He was certain, now, that he would stick to his story, even if no one cared anymore: he was going to see Yaara. Where he would really go, he had no idea.
He wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve, and noticed he was wearing the red shirt his mother had bought him on his first day of high school. He’d come home that day grumbling that the other kids had nice clothes while he was wearing old rags from Florida, and that maybe they didn’t get this, but he wasn’t going to keep wearing hand-me-downs like his older brother had. No clothes—no school. When he went into his room that evening he found two shirts on his bed, one red and one blue, with a folded piece of yellow paper next to them. He couldn’t remember every word it said, only the last part: that one day he would grow up and be wiser, and then she would tell him everything, but for now there were too many things beyond his grasp, and when he found out about them he would regret his misdeeds, and she hoped it wouldn’t be too late. “You will feel remorse,” she wrote, “and I hope you remember our better times. I still don’t understand when things went wrong.”
After he read the letter he could feel invisible fingernails scratching his body, and flashes of pain climbed up from the pit of his stomach to his neck and down his back. He sat on the floor with the new notebook he’d bought for the first day of high school and started writing things he knew and things he didn’t know: the two years his parents and Shaul had spent in New York before he was born, a time of which he knew almost nothing except the way their eyes glazed over when they talked about it, as though a miracle had occurred there that had melted away the pains of life, and for two whole years they had floated through the streets of that city marveling at its gift. The close relationship between Shaul and his mother, he knew, had formed during all the crises that had befallen the family before he was born, and he felt that the two of them, unlike him, lived in the shadow of those mythical events. His mother had said that one day she would tell him everything and he would understand, but she’d also claimed he would understand too late, after she died.
In his new notebook, he wrote what he’d heard about distant times. By the time she was twelve, his mother was in full charge of her household, after her father, Albert Mansur, a card-playing ladies’ man, had picked up and moved to Haifa, where he sold shoes. Yonatan learned more details from his paternal grandmother, who told him with barely concealed glee that his mother’s family was poor, that his other grandmother, Sarah, never stopped loving her wayward husband Albert (“a charming gentleman whom the Jewish community here in Jerusalem could not comprehend”) to her dying day, and that after Albert left she lay in bed for months on end, her spirits uplifted only by the occasional visit from her estranged husband and by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s sermons at the synagogue. His grandmother also told Yonatan that his twelve-year-old mother was the only person in her family who took care of her little brother and sister, as well as their mother and Albert’s elderly parents.
His mother did not talk about her childhood, but she praised Grandma Sarah for her generosity, modesty and devotion to God, who, unfortunately, loved sinners and did not reward the righteous. Once, when his mother was lighting Shabbat candles, standing quietly before the flames with her eyes closed, Yonatan asked with a touch of disdain if she believed in God. She said she wasn’t sure. He insisted on knowing why she lit candles if she had these doubts, and she replied that she did it for her mother, who had never sinned and had lived a life of hardship.
As he touched the fabric of the new shirts, he thought back to a recent evening when Kowerski’s mother, a therapist with cropped hair, turned up at their home with her son, who was invited for a sleepover. The two mothers sat in the living room, chatted and laughed, and arranged to meet for coffee downtown. When Yonatan came home from school the next day, his mother observed, “Madam Psychologist wanted to see if we were good enough for her son to spend the night here.” He was disappointed, having hoped his mother might finally befriend one of his classmates’ mothers, but more than that he was surprised: it had never occurred to him that anyone could doubt that his family was respectable. Sometime later, when his mother’s friend Dr. Sternberg came to visit and the two of them sat in the living room reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Nietzsche and Leibowitz, and his mother wrote down Sternberg’s explanations in her notebook, it dawned on him that only one of Sarah and Albert’s four children had gone to university—Yitzhak, the youngest. He replayed the distasteful way his mother had articulated the words “Madam Psychologist,” and was saddened by her weakness. The first plan that came to mind was to run to the shopping center and buy her flowers or a mug full of candy that said “Best Mom in the World,” like he used to do when he upset her as a child. On the bureau in his parents’ bedroom there still stood a few musical mugs and decorative bowls with notes attached: “To the dearest/best/most loved mom in the world, I won’t ever do it again/I’m very sorry for what I said.” But he was in high school now, the mugs looked silly, and he didn’t know how to talk to her about such sensitive matters.
He reread the words his mother had written on the note beside the shirts—“I still don’t understand when things went wrong.” His mother had always spoken of the harmony of the early years, when he had been desperately attached to her and swore he would marry her when he grew up. The two of them used to walk the streets of Jerusalem together for hours, or spend time in her office at the postal service reading books he loved, like Sasha and the Dreams and Sasha and the Imagination, and in summer they would spread a sheet out on the balcony and sit down to play “True or False.” It was his mother who ruled the story that bound together his earliest memories, even though many of them took place in the home of his nanny, Ahuva. One memory was so lucid that he never doubted it: he wakes up in the early morning, light fog, silver clouds showering rain, Ahuva and her husband are still asleep. He hops out of bed and runs to the living room, slides open the heavy glass door, and walks barefoot across the frozen mud in the yard. Dizzied by the smell of onions, he kneels down and touches a bright green stalk, and licks drops of rain off its tip.
The commonly accepted narrative in his family was that at some point the amity between him and his mother was disrupted. He searched his memory, not for the first time, for the moment when the fissure had occurred, grasping at the tail end of events that might testify to the time before and the time after, seeking to sketch a map of his interactions with his mother in the notebook. But when he wrote, he found that in fact he was reconstructing her map, hunting for memories that would burnish the good era and blacken the bad. She had instilled in him, at a very young age, her narrative of the two separate eras, the long period of unity until he had betrayed her. The betrayal was unrelated to anything he did—it was simply the child he became.
He looked over the lopsided letters, the exclamation marks, the wide columns adorning the text—he always doodled columns—and ripped the pages out of the notebook. He stepped onto the balcony, turned his body against the wind, crouched down and held a lighter to the pages, dropped them in an old dish and watched them burn. Then he put on his smart black pants and the new red shirt, which he tucked in, even though he hated doing that. He combed his mane into a sort of side-part, but his head was shaved down either side and it looked strange.
When he walked into the living room and his mother looked up, she grinned: “That shade of red looks so good on you,” she said, getting up to come closer to him. They stood facing each other, she straightened his collar and smoothed out the wrinkles on his sleeves. He pushed her hands away in playful protestation and said, “Stop it,” but the futility of his response irritated him—why couldn’t he sometimes just let things go?—and as she turned away, he put his arm around her shoulders and told her that he liked the shirt. He could smell her cloyingly sweet perfume, a scent familiar from childhood. She leaned her cheek on his arm, and he took her hands and held them up and spun her around as if they were dancing. Her black eyes beamed at him and her movements felt somehow airy as he whirled her around again, then let her spin him, and she said he was the only one in the family who knew how to dance, and that he would grow up to be a ladies’ man. “I should have already been one by now,” he remarked with a smile that did not conceal his bitterness. “I’m fourteen.”
She came to his room later, with a dish of sliced apples, and exclaimed, “You won’t believe this!” She’d seen in the paper that they were showing Gone with the Wind at the neighborhood cinema that night.
“What time?” he asked.
“Ten p.m.,” she replied mischievously, anticipating his surprise.
“But that means it’ll end at two a.m.!” he said.
She was delighted. “So you’ll get up late for school this one time. So what? But only if you want to go.”
“Of course I do,” he said, sad to think she could doubt his ability to recognize how rare this moment was.
Later that night, his mother put on her white pants and cream-colored poufy blouse, and she asked him, the way she used to when he was a child, if her outfit looked good or if she should change. She pulled on her coat with the gray fur-lined collar, and he did not change out of his black pants and new shirt. In the taxi to the cinema they avoided talking, knowing the occasion was both festive and fragile. They sat in the second row; there were only four other people at the movie. After about an hour he fell asleep, and when he woke up he saw his mother’s head drooping, her eyes shut, a few tangled curls clinging to her forehead. Every time he imagined her without her curls, the weary, plucked figure terrified him, and he still hoped it would not happen. Her eyelids fluttered and her upper lip trembled. He moved his right hand over her head and gently held her shoulder, and with his left he clutched her hand, as though seeking to protect her while she glided through the worlds of sleep.
He woke her up at the midnight intermission and walked her, still sleepy, out into the cold night. She huddled in her coat, held his arm, he pressed his hand on hers and they both looked up at the clear, starry sky over the shopping center. Her mood seemed cheerful now, and she told him that, when she was more or less his age, she’d spent several months in hospital.
“Which one?”
“Bikur Holim.”
“But that’s a religious hospital,” he pointed out, and regretted his inflammatory tone. He knew she’d gone to Evelina de Rothschild, a religious school for girls, and that her tuition was paid by her uncle Aziz. What sort of clothes had she worn as a child? He tried to picture her in an ankle-length skirt and button-down blouse like the ones he saw on the religious girls downtown, but the fragmentary images—the girls downtown, the hallways of Bikur Holim, his mother as a young girl—refused to cohere.
Ignoring his comment, she told him she’d had severe arthritis.
“That sounds awful,” he said tenderly, “you must have gone crazy in there.”
She laughed and said it was a wonderful time, perhaps the best of her life. “You should have seen my doctor, Dr. Zussman,” she said, pronouncing his name in a caressing whisper. “He was a real Clark Gable. All the women in Jerusalem used to line up outside his office, wearing their prettiest dresses, with hats and scarves and high heels, like they’d stepped out of a magazine, just to have him diagnose their illnesses.”
“Are you saying you were in love with your doctor?” he asked with a chuckle.
She looked at him, baffled by how obtuse he could be, perhaps remembering why she didn’t confide in him anymore. Her laughter lines vanished and her expression grew even more distant. He could not translate the meaning of the strange glow in her eyes, a verve that seemed to signal that all the emotions churning inside him, like his yearning for some girl or other, had once electrified her too.
“He was in love with me,” she said.
That conversation had taken place more than three years ago, two months after she was diagnosed. Now, time was once again severed: instead of the bad years and the good years, there was the time before and the time after.
——
“Is your mother okay?” Lior asked.
He’d hated the question since they’d first met shortly after his seventeenth birthday. It always seemed somehow dubious, anticipating the day when the answer would be no. He answered that his parents were in New York for his mother’s treatment. Lior expressed no surprise or interest, only repeating, “But is she okay?” For a minute he considered teasing her: “Define okay.” But he couldn’t summon the necessary irony. “I told you not to ask me that,” he hissed, and remembered that she said he’d first caught her attention when Tali, her classmate, told her about Yoel’s friend who got into a fight with some other kid after beautifully discussing a Goethe poem in class (something about a father riding a horse at night while carrying his dying infant).
Lior had been amused by the drastic swing between tenderness and violence, even though she found it immature, like something out of a teen TV show. “But at least you’re trying to do something interesting,” she’d said. Later, after they’d been introduced by Tali, Lior said she sometimes saw something apologetic, maybe even shy, in his darting eyes that avoided direct contact, and in the way he grimaced, but that it was quickly replaced by aggression because that way he felt more protected. She said there was something unnatural about how he moved and responded, which made people feel uncomfortable around him, and that maybe if he really were a thug things would be simpler.
“At the end of the day we’re all thugs, aren’t we?” he retorted, not entirely sure what he meant, although the idea sounded reasonable.
When the phone rang he knew it was her. He’d been waiting for months to hear her voice, since that morning in his room when she could no longer bear the way he interrogated her—he kept going even though Yoel warned him it would end in disaster—and admitted that she didn’t love him and maybe never had. His passion for her must have infected her; she had tried desperately to love him. It was clear that she was acknowledging the truth of her own words even as she said them. For an instant he even felt sorry for her, because of the sadness in her voice and her expression, and he knew she’d done everything to convince herself that she loved him. When he picked up the phone he also knew that for the last four days he hadn’t talked to a living soul or left the house except to visit Ratzon Dahari, the neighbor downstairs, where he sometimes had dinner when his parents were away.
“Have you seen her recently?” Lior asked.
“Who?” he replied with fake innocence.
“Have you seen her or haven’t you? Have you seen Yaara?”
“That’s not your business anymore.”
Lior said nothing, and then she said she’d been missing him lately. He took a deep breath and knew what he had to say even if the answer would doom him to more loneliness, and that if he said something else she might come over and they would lie in bed and he would be buried in her arms—she always said that no human creature could provide the octopus embrace he longed for—and his pain would subside. But there was no other way. “You’re dead to me,” he said. She gave a wounded gasp of surprise and waited another moment before hanging up, as if she were still hoping he would say, “Just kidding.” If that had occurred to her, it meant she really did not understand anything.
He swallowed down bitter saliva and waited for his spirits to lift. “The defeat is crushing,” he’d written to Yoel after Lior left that morning, in a note that was ostensibly about affairs of the kingdom. For months he waited for her to take a step that would somehow soften his defeat.
A memory from last September came crashing down on him: shortly after they met, he got his driver’s license and went straight to Lior’s. They drove for hours, listening to her Gladys Knight & the Pips tape, and of course he lied about knowing “Midnight Train to Georgia.” A warm, dry wind caressed their faces and its taste mingled with the sharp smell of cigarette smoke in the car (he’d bought a pack of JPS Black to impress her), and every moment his body wasn’t touching her he was overcome by a terrifying loneliness. When he held her hand, stroked her hair, or when she clung to him, the serenity he felt was intoxicating and everything around them—the blue sky, the trees on Aza Street, the gas station by the museum—looked perfectly made, as though he were finally seeing a world he had not stopped searching for all these years, a world in which he was loved.
He was saddened by the knowledge that she had been alive for a long time without him, that she had been molded by forces he did not know, that she had trusted other loves. When they stopped outside her house in the evening she put her hand on his cheek and asked, as if she understood everything, if he could learn to rely on her love when she was not with him. He said he would learn anything she wanted him to, and she laughed: “You’re totally in love.”
He considered various niggling responses that would cast doubt on what she’d said, but he just wanted to give in to it all, to accelerate the dizziness even more.
He had trouble tolerating the fullness of that memory and the sight of his fawning smile when he sat with her in the car—it filled his throat with a bitter taste. He imagined his fingers reaching into his mind to tear out the entire month of August, throbbing like a heart removed from a living body, and burying it in the wadi.
In the living room he lit a cigarette, and was aware that in the more bearable moments of pain he could summon up the pathos required to act the tormented version of himself, instead of sprawling out on the couch and waiting to be swallowed by sleep. In the liquor cabinet he looked for the vodka he and Yoel used to drink when they roamed the wadi at night, still in disbelief at being allowed to be there after all the evenings they’d spent watching the black void from their balconies and yearning for nocturnal adventures. They never drank together anymore. All he found was his parents’ cheap cognac.
He walked out of the living room, heading for the mirror in his parents’ bedroom, the only one he looked in anymore. There had been a day in the school bathroom when the light was harsh, and his reflection had disgusted him: his face was too wide, his skin red and inflamed, his eyes sunken and large, one darker than the other, his nose was big, and his long, greasy hair sprouted out as if someone had perched an umbrella on his head. His expression looked banal, the kind you dismiss as quickly as you smooth out a crease in your clothes. He had walked away from the sight in shock, and since that day, light had become problematic. He didn’t even turn the light on when he showered. On sunny days he was careful not to get too close to shop windows, because the glaring light exposed all the little defects in his face; he cherished gray days with no trace of the sun, when he would dare to look at his reflection from afar. In his parents’ room, he had a ritual: he drew the blinds, switched on only his father’s desk lamp, with the beam aimed at the floor, and then stood before the wooden framed mirror with the folding wings. In that faint light he was even fond of his face.
Looking at his reflection, he imagined that he could see a space opening up in the center of his chest—now that he and Lior were frozen in that state, nothing could change between them. The lucidity of the picture frightened him. It was not the imagination whose colors, pictures and hallucinations he knew, but a different force that swirled inside him now, and it felt foreign. He wondered what Lior was wearing when she’d spoken with him. He knew all her outfits: black dress, red dress with black circles, blue wool skirt, T-shirts with numbers or lettering, untidy hair snaking playfully down her neck, a thin silver necklace—these were for cafés, restaurant dinners, smoking pot at the biology student’s apartment next door. Flared jeans and a tank top with strappy heels—for pubs and music shows. Sweatpants, plain white T-shirt, hair tied back—popping out to return a video, buy cigarettes or beer, visit a girlfriend. Sometimes she came out in a dress, and he liked to look at her as she walked down the path to his car, a sort of single continuous motion, with a domineering expression in her eyes, expecting something to excite her. “She’s not special enough for that look,” Tali decreed, even though they went to school together and were supposedly good friends.
He imagined a version of himself standing at this mirror in a week or two; maybe some of the humiliation, the shock of betrayal, would have subsided a little. Perhaps the person who constantly replayed their days together would have hardened. While they’d been together, after all, he hadn’t truly believed in the possibility of losing her: he had always bought into dreadful scenarios he did not think would come true, bought into them because he did not believe in them.
His fingers played with her shirt—in fact with all her shirts, now patched into one—aiming to caress her stomach. He touched his face, which was sweaty and hot, or perhaps it was his fingers that were hot. How could he have failed to understand that as soon as he redeemed his dignity and the anger began to subside, there would be nothing to protect him from the longing.
“Have you seen Yaara?” He heard a screech and realized he was listening to his own laughter—was he really laughing? He strained his eyes and saw no signs of laughter. She really didn’t understand anything.
Yaara was the daughter of his parents’ friends in Tel Aviv, and he’d known her and her older sister, Avigail, since childhood. She’d never shown any interest in him, preferring the bronzed, muscular boys who wore colorful bermuda shorts and surfed in the daytime and played guitar on the beach in the evenings, with their long, sun-bleached hair flying in the wind—in other words, beach boys. To her it was audacious of him, a pale-skinned Jerusalem boy, to sport bright surfers’ clothes in the late eighties. Last Passover, after Yonatan’s mother finished a round of treatments and regained her strength, the two families had stayed at a kibbutz hotel in the Galilee. Avigail was almost nineteen, with black hair and blue eyes, a rebellious type who was about to begin her military service after announcing she wanted “either an office job near home or a wedding.” Yonatan had always been slightly afraid of her sharp tongue. Yaara, who was born a few weeks after him, was a thin blonde with dark chestnut eyes, a kind, generous girl whom everyone admired. His older brother once told him that when the parents got together they disparaged Yonatan and Avigail but talked of Yaara as a prodigy.
When he stepped out of the car into the blazing sun at the kibbutz, he saw the sisters leaning carelessly on their dad’s car, their faces turned to the sky and light dancing on the frames of their dark sunglasses. Avigail wore a short black tank top with one shoulder strap falling down her arm, which was slightly red, and a thin blouse tied around her waist. Yaara had on an airy, knee-length, cream-colored dress with black polka dots. Her feet moved on the hot asphalt of the parking lot, and her toes, with their nails painted dark red, played with the silver strap of her high-heeled sandals. The lust that surged through his limbs stunned him. The girls’ bodies savored the sun, which threw bright light on their skin while other parts remained in shadow. He had never been so close to such exciting girls.
He put on his sunglasses and waved hello. They didn’t see him. His mother went over to them, and to his surprise they called out to her and gave her long hugs. Finally his mother drew their attention to Yonatan and his father, who asked clumsily, “Everything going well, girls?” Yonatan sneaked a glance at his father, who looked at the three women and then at the asphalt and back at them, and for the first time in his life it occurred to him that his father was also a man who could feel passion, and he was overcome by embarrassment. Fortunately his father went back to the car and began unloading their luggage.
As a young boy he’d been embarrassed around the sisters, but in the year and a half since he’d last seen them things had changed. He was not the chubby boy they used to know. He had woven together a personality from gestures and tones he borrowed from people he knew and from protagonists in books or TV series. Yoel said the two of them had a problem: they were capable of liking themselves only by means of the contempt they showed everyone else.
At dinner on the first night, Yaara expressed some interest in Yonatan, and they talked about a lot of things. After the meal they left the group and walked alone on the damp grass, passing through the dark areas and the milky-white pentagons cast on the kibbutz paths by lamps. They trampled leaves and twigs and moist earth under their shoes, and reached a small hill at the edge of the kibbutz that looked onto the darkness of the bare fields. Slightly out of breath, they climbed up, walked down the other side and wandered through the fields. When their feet sank into a muddy puddle, Yaara laughed, and countless images—him caressing her hair, holding her hand, kissing her neck—flickered before his eyes, enticing him to make them come true.
The stones beneath their feet became larger and Yaara tripped slightly. He caught her upper arm and her body turned, their legs pressed together. Her face was very close and he felt his lips burning. But she quickly turned away. Perhaps he’d lingered too long. He jokingly offered—still reconstructing the missed moment when his lips had fluttered over hers—to carry her so she would not fall again, and she replied, “You wish,” but in a playful tone, as though if he tried he might convince her. But he was afraid she would reject him, so he just laughed in a somewhat creaky voice.
He had not yet entirely let go of her, but Yaara gently moved her hand, ran her fingers over his bicep as if by accident, and they walked arm in arm and said nothing more. He took pleasure in the silence but was afraid she’d be bored, so he blurted out something about his mother, and when they started talking he realized that Yaara knew a lot about the illness. At one point she paused before mentioning the name of a new doctor his parents were seeing, realizing that she might know things that were being kept from him.
It’s no wonder she knew things: before his mother got ill, his parents used to go to Tel Aviv every Thursday, and his mother would meet his father at the end of the day at Yaara’s family home. Yaara said they missed his mother, who hadn’t visited recently because of the treatments, and she described how they used to sit in the yard and his mother would smoke a cigarette and drink red wine or a martini and cheer them up with her imitations of his father grumbling about being tired.
Every Thursday in recent months his mother went to the hospital for treatments. Early in the week she would be in a good mood, and sometimes she even played hooky and left the house, but by Tuesday her face would be tense and her posture hunched, and anyone who tried to get near her would be accused of nosiness or even malice. Yonatan was usually tasked with keeping away the nuisances. By Wednesday she hardly left her room and spoke to almost no one. On Thursday morning a friend or her sister would come to care for her, and he felt their home fill with their calming presence. His own presence in the home, and the very fact of his existence, were of no use to his mother. Unlike Shaul, who used to sit for hours on the stool in her room and exchange secrets with her, Yonatan would stand preening at the mirror. They made fun of how long he spent on his hair, like a girl, and discussed him as if he weren’t there. Unlike Shaul, Yonatan told his mother almost nothing. Perhaps that was what she never forgave him for. He had disappointed her bitterly, and by the time she became ill she’d lost interest in him. And so he preferred it when other people, those who were really close to her, filled her room with noises and voices.
Most days, it was just the two of them at home. She lay alone in bed and he orbited around her. He would sit in his room or in the living room and hear her groaning or coughing or watching television and talking on the phone. Sometimes he went to the shops and bought her a baguette or crackers with butter, food for when the nausea passed, and sometimes in the afternoon they lay on her bed watching TV together. At the end of the week her door was shut, and he saw her friends or sister going in and out, carrying the blue basin she vomited in. On rare occasions she left her room, thin and shriveled, wearing a white robe and a headscarf, and he would follow her with his gaze, fighting off his recognition that the disease was relentlessly diminishing her body. He knew that her friends, just like her, believed he could do more for her, and that their reserved but friendly demeanor was hiding outrage.
He began telling Yaara about the atmosphere at home and how much his mother complained about him and talked about things she’d missed out on in life. He stopped after a while because he did not want to muddy Yaara’s vivacious picture of his mother. But a look of sardonic pity had come over her face, as though she’d been listening to him politely but without real interest, and he realized that the picture he was painting of his mother made no impression on her: it was as though they were talking about two different women. Yaara walked a few steps away. “I’m bored with rebellious adolescents,” she said. He was enchanted by the slight contempt with which she regarded him, and by the way she moved, which seemed infused with a knowing serenity. It was as though while everyone else tried out different identity pieces, tormenting themselves over trivialities, she walked the world with the complacency of those who have always been loved and who never try to make people like them. She accepted his jabs with equanimity, as if she understood that she was obliged to overlook the jealousy of flawed individuals.
He woke up early in the morning, sweating, with a fever and a sore throat. Everyone went hiking and he stayed in bed. He tossed back and forth between sleep and wakefulness, seeing multiple faces that peeked in to ask how he was—perhaps they were there or perhaps he dreamed them. As the hours went by he found it harder to tolerate the waiting. He knew that tomorrow she would leave and that, if nothing happened now, it would likely never happen.
She came when evening began to fall and a few faint stars were already flickering at the edge of the sky, above blue inlets slowly turning purple. She stood in the middle of the room, without turning on the light, and debated which of the two beds to sit on while his body teemed with anticipation. The only sound in the room was his wheezing breaths, and he tried to stifle them. Finally she sat on the edge of his bed, put her hand on the mattress near his waist, and her hair touched his shirt. Her silence buoyed him: she recognized the intimacy they had woven yesterday, and now she did not know how to act; their childhood customs were no longer valid. At last, perhaps because of his high fever and the closeness of her body, he said what was in his heart: he’d been waiting for her all day. His fingers stroked her blue-painted fingernails. She put her hand on the back of his hot hand, and the world at once widened, new paths emerged before his eyes, and he believed he had the power to follow them, to overcome obstacles and explore choices.
He smoothed his left hand over the back of her neck, and his fingers caressed her hair. Suddenly they heard a noise and listened together to the voices in the hallway. To his horror they were coming closer, and he heard his mother saying she hoped the chicken breast hadn’t got too cold. Yaara’s father said it tasted like a rubber shoe anyway, and they all laughed. Yaara stood up, but stayed close, and their fingers were still intertwined. The back of his hand, where her palm had touched, still bore an odd sensation of nakedness. He asked if she would come later, after dinner, and she said maybe.
When he awoke the next morning, still groggy from the pills he’d taken, they’d already left.
——
He couldn’t remember when he’d first mentioned Yaara’s name to Lior. It might have been a month after they’d met, when he realized that Lior’s past haunted her (it always haunted him). She often reminisced about her two previous boyfriends, but he had no equivalent memories of his own. In the storyline he told Lior and later had no choice but to tell everyone, he and Yaara had kissed on the kibbutz, and since then they met every so often in Tel Aviv, and they’d done “a lot” but hadn’t had sex.
Then there was the story he wrote in his notebook: Yaara’s father had died of cancer when she was in tenth grade. He had left the family some money and property, but after his death she lost interest in people. Most nights she lay awake in bed and the years with her father descended on her, there was nowhere to hide, and maybe she didn’t want to. She got lost in a medley of colors, streets, cities, pictures and years, unable to isolate any single detail. When he saw her at her father’s funeral—which he described sparingly, as he’d never been to a cemetery in Tel Aviv—he was gripped by a strange certainty, perhaps because of his mother’s illness, that they would soon become close. This was a detail he always made a point of mentioning in his stories: that even then, two years before they kissed on the kibbutz, Yaara had become a part of his world. It’s not that he’d fallen in love with her, but it was a closeness determined by life-and-death forces.
Every time Yonatan met Yaara’s father he felt he’d done him an injustice, or that perhaps he’d cursed him and hastened his real death. In one of his accounts of Yaara and her father’s death and her insomnia, he realized he was using images he feared would come to be in his own life, ones that had plagued him since his mother had taken ill. It was mean, he felt dirty writing it, but the story had taken on a life of its own.
He brandished Yaara every time he thought Lior was losing interest or pining for her ex-boyfriends, and if she mentioned a memory to do with them, he waited a few days and invented one of his own. Then he added it to the notebook. When Lior was focused on him, Yaara would disappear, and if Lior asked about her he trivialized her importance or sent her back to an ex-boyfriend. He was surprised Lior didn’t notice the pattern. His work was complete when Lior said she would prefer him not to talk to Yaara anymore, and of course he agreed: it wasn’t particularly complicated to do.
On the morning of the break-up, Lior told him: “So are you going to be with Yaara now?” There was a note of irony in her voice, or perhaps he only imagined it, and he was struck by despair upon realizing that even if it were true, it wouldn’t do any good now. Later he tormented himself by wondering if Yaara’s existence had accelerated their breakup, and whether, had he swallowed his pride and given himself to Lior, she might have stayed with him. At the same time he remembered that Lior hadn’t doubted his love—the intensity of his love had made her believe that she loved him.
After the breakup, he kicked the plotline up a notch: he and Yaara became very close, not exactly a couple, but he’d gone to visit his aunt in Tel Aviv a few times and—as he told everyone, especially Tali, who he knew would tell Lior—he’d seen Yaara there. In fact he said he was going to see her this coming Friday. Maybe Lior had called because she’d heard he was going.
He went over to the window and looked across the street at Yoel’s room. Four crows circled, screeching at the colorful curtain that Tali had sewn for him, then perched on the tree in the yard. Beyond the wadi a storm was simmering. The quiet suburban night was disturbed by the whistling wind, which sometimes sounded like emergency sirens. The branches moved, and the crows took flight. Yoel’s light was on, and he thought he detected movement. He really was going to have to go somewhere on Friday now, because if he stayed home—even if he parked the car on another street—Yoel would know. He probably knew anyway, and that was why he hardly ever asked about Yaara, but that didn’t matter. They’d always both known: the minute you invent a story, you are obliged to defend it and see it through to the end.