Silver and diamonds glistened on necks and hands, reflected back from the lobby’s windows, chandeliers and mirrors. Countless little crosses glimmered all around him. The hotel was full of teenagers: boys in tuxedos, girls in high heels and ball gowns that grazed the floor, with gold necklaces, tiaras, bracelets and rings. They delighted in their finery, constantly touching their clothes, smoothing out creases, floating past the ogling hotel guests without a glance except when they stopped to hand someone a star-encrusted iPhone and face him with all their youthful vigor, arranging themselves in two rows—one kneeling, one standing—composed of couples embracing or trios of boys leaping on each other’s shoulders.
Yonatan had never seen such an extravagant high school prom. He walked out to the patio overlooking the swimming pool, in the center of which was a fountain lit up in changing colors. He mingled with the kids, listened to them, looked them over. He was the only hotel guest brave enough to stand out there. One girl shot him a look and said something in Spanish. No one else took any notice of him, but he did not feel like a complete stranger among them.
He bummed a cigarette from one of the boys, whose eyes radiated light green under thick brows as he raked his fingers through his light-brown mane. The boy smiled and slapped Yonatan’s shoulder as he handed him a cigarette. Yonatan asked, in Spanish, how his evening was going, and the boy replied in English: “Prom night, you know,” gave a thumbs-up and turned his back on him slowly, perhaps so as not to offend him.
He walked back inside to the lobby, where people were milling around, and crossed over to the great room. Just last week there’d been young festival workers all over this space, patiently dealing with authors who pestered them about interesting places to see in town, grumbled about events attended by no more than ten people, including their editors, gave press interviews, or boasted to pretty volunteers in short dresses about all the languages their books had been translated into and about their drunken escapades with famous American writers whose books they made a point of bashing. On the walls, which last week were covered by plastic bookshelves and posters with hackneyed quotes about the love of literature, there were now green signs emblazoned with the slogan, “2050: Green Mexico City,” alongside pictures of solar panels, electric cars and wind turbines. The boys and girls from the prom had vanished, apparently into the ballroom. He went up to the restaurant floor, turned right and took another broad but poorly lit staircase up one more level, and was surprised to hear nineties music blaring from behind three heavy iron doors.
He stood outside the ballroom for a while. Every so often a young couple walked by, holding hands. Finally he went back down to the lobby, which had gone suddenly cold. He rubbed his arms and walked faster to warm up, looking around for the young woman with glasses. But she wasn’t there. The magazine publisher had told him he’d found her and that she’d be waiting for him there at nine this evening. Why had he even believed him?
——
Yoel had met Itamar only in the middle of last summer. A few times Yonatan had asked him over, implying that they were starting to feel hurt and that Shira might bear a grudge, but at other times he’d said it wasn’t urgent, Yoel could visit whenever he felt like it. Finally, one Friday at five, Yoel knocked on their door. He hugged Shira and then Yonatan. He did not charge into the living room the way he used to, but walked behind them as they led him to Itamar, who was lying in his playpen. Yoel approached as if performing a practiced move, jiggled the baby’s hand, stroked his cheek, kissed his belly, put his face right up to him and exclaimed in a put-on voice, “What a cutie! You little rascal!”
Then he straightened up and stood there, holding onto the edge of the playpen, and stared wide-eyed at Itamar—it was obvious that he was not actually seeing him—with the same look that had begun to appear in his eyes over the last year or so. At first it had led everyone astray because he seemed so focused, until they realized that it meant he wasn’t listening to anyone and couldn’t see a thing. It was a look that sliced through everything he saw and dived into another realm. There were many nights when Yonatan lay next to Shira and imagined Yoel in his childhood bed at 10 HaGuy Street, staring up at the ceiling. What was he seeing? Was there any way to know? They had already learned that one cannot see the world through another person’s eyes.
For a while they stood there silently, the three of them, waiting for something. Yonatan knew he should say something upbeat, but a pain was sharpening in his hips and his whole body felt weak. Yoel turned to them with a friendly face, cleared his throat as if trying to choose the correct tone, but said nothing. Shira talked about the baby’s weight, and Yonatan could hear Yoel breathing next to him. He hoped Yoel wouldn’t ask to pick Itamar up, and felt ashamed of how repelled he was by the idea, but in his mind’s eye he saw Yoel running to the window with the baby.
Yoel was apparently trying to enlist the cheerfulness he could always fire up at will. “He looks like both of you,” his voice creaked, and Yonatan could no longer interrupt the motion that would put him between Yoel and Itamar. As he moved closer, Yoel turned and sat down on the couch, as if his efforts had drained all his strength. It wasn’t possible that Yoel knew what was going through his mind, Yonatan thought with horror. But then a deeper dread burst into his consciousness: even if Yoel did know, he didn’t care.
“What about a drink, kind sir? A little whiskey would be nice. But gimme something from your secret stash, you cheapskate,” Yoel proclaimed. He drummed on the table with his hands. “The things and I, we are good friends. It’s secret, top secret.” Yonatan tried to remember which of Yoel’s old characters he was doing, then remembered it was an impersonation of a poet they’d once met, a young woman who spoke in raptured whispers about poetry and love until Yoel told her he thought Arik Einstein’s pop songs were pure poetry.
He went into the kitchen. He heard Yoel humming a song they used to like, until his voice spluttered into a fake cough and the living room went silent. Without turning on the light, he stood by the kitchen window: a group of boys in shorts and tank tops leaned against the front of the building, passing a beer around and gazing toward Ibn Gavirol Street.
Yonatan picked up plates and glasses and put them back down, moved the bottle of whiskey back and forth, making noise that would attest to some sort of action and hoping that meanwhile Shira would cheer up Yoel, that he’d hear sounds of laughter. He considered suggesting a poker game—he could “spice up the deal with a little cash,” as Yoel used to say—they’d started gambling at age eleven, playing poker in the neighborhood, then Texas Hold’em, casinos in Jericho, casinos in London, betting on races or election results—but he remembered that Yoel was disgusted by gambling now, and even more so by money. He tilted his ear to the living room: Shira wasn’t talking with Yoel, and he silently cursed her as he walked back.
He stood the whiskey bottle in the middle of the table with three glass snifters, and waited for Yoel to tell his customary anecdote about the girl who’d once accused Yonatan of keeping two kinds of whiskey at home—an expensive one for himself and a cheap one for guests. But Yoel did not follow the ritual. After the first sip, Yonatan reminded him of the story and a faint smile flashed across Yoel’s face, but it vanished so quickly that Yonatan couldn’t be sure he’d really seen it. Yoel gave a sideways look at Shira, who was holding the baby, and mused, “Cute. Looks a lot like both of you.” It was the first time he’d heard Yoel use his normal voice all evening.
Yoel looked at his blue bag and they both knew he wanted to pull out one of their crumpled old school notebooks but was afraid of Yonatan’s response. He’d threatened Yoel that if he saw those notebooks again he’d burn the lot of them.
“I can’t believe I actually left you in the basement that day,” Yoel said. “What a shit I was.”
“Seriously. Such a shit.”
“You could have left too.”
“True, I could have.”
“So how come you stayed?”
“I didn’t want to leave Tali alone with them.”
“Don’t lie, she left before I did,” Yoel said with a sullen look.
“I was afraid she’d come back.”
“Well, at least I didn’t leave you to die alone in the wadi,” Yoel said with a grin.
“You know I lost you,” Yonatan answered, trying in vain to sound light-hearted.
Shira looked at him. She was familiar with the casual way the two of them conjured up the past, but she was still surprised by how natural his voice sounded when he answered Yoel. She came closer to them, with Itamar in her arms, and he suspected she was eager to get Yoel out of there.
“Look at his eyes,” he said to Yoel, “they’re a copy of Shira’s.”
Yoel glanced at the baby. “Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded, and looked away and sipped his whiskey.
There was a tense silence. Yoel was obviously hoping Shira would leave them alone. “Look at those calves,” Yonatan insisted, stroking Itamar, whose eyes were smiling. He was overcome by a desire to cradle the boy in his arms and bury his face in his neck. Yoel touched the baby’s shins for a second and pulled his hand back. Yonatan couldn’t understand why Yoel didn’t want to caress the baby and kiss his cheeks, and he tried not to get angry. Yoel stood up, went over to his bag, found a cigarette, put it to his lips and said he was going out to smoke. “I’ll come with you,” Yonatan said.
The asphalt under their feet was warm, and a curl of blue smoke glowed in the headlights of a car. The treetops looked enormous and enchanted; he’d never noticed before how their branches met in a sort of arbor over the street. They walked arm in arm, pinching and tripping each other up, while Yoel grumbled about the summer: everyone was sweaty and stinky, the world was a sticky mess, everything you touched stuck to your body like a magnet and it was completely suffocating.
He smelled Yoel’s sweat, saw his fingernails that had grown long and dark, the scabby wounds on the back of his hand, his sparse beard with little bald patches. They always used to walk arm in arm, and weren’t even aware of doing it until Shira once took a picture of them because she liked it. In the first few years of their relationship, her eyes used to light up every time they got together with Yoel, and she usually stayed for a while, enjoying their word games and the way they hurled insults at each other and tried to win her over. She sensed the element in their friendship that ignited whenever they met and lifted Yonatan’s spirits. She said every meeting was a celebration, and she was enchanted by their delight in each other. But over time her comments began to change. She said there was a sort of lava that erupted from them; it spurted out of their language and was oblivious to the people around them, who were only there to confirm the perfect unity between Yoel and Yonatan. Once, after she’d spent an evening with them, she said with a surprised laugh that all they talked about was the girls from Beit HaKerem and the boys from Beit HaKerem and the fights in Beit HaKerem.
Yonatan was used to touching Yoel, but now walking with him he realized he was maneuvering his body to diminish their contact without Yoel noticing. He felt crushed by something akin to orphan-hood, because he knew that the atmosphere when they were together now depended on him alone. “Everyone grew up and we’re the only ones still pretending,” they always used to say, but even when Itamar was born Yonatan hadn’t felt the same need to grow up urgently that he did now.
He put his arm around Yoel, pressed his head against his chest, and pinched his shoulder. “May you know of no sorrow!” he yelled, summoning one of their touchstone moments when the past was what they needed. A friend of theirs had died at only twenty-five, and when they visited the family during the shiva, a woman went up to one of the relatives and clutched his hand, saying, “May you know of no sorrow.”
Yoel corrected her, “May you know no more sorrow.”
The woman gave him an astonished look: “That’s what I said,” she mumbled.
“No,” Yoel replied calmly, “you said something else.”
It was usually Yoel who told that story, though, reconstructing every detail, where everyone had been sitting or standing, imitating all the characters, while Yonatan laughed and egged him on. But now Yoel only gave an indifferent snort of laughter, and Yonatan overcame his reluctance and pinched him, squeezing so hard that he lost sensation in his fingers. He waited for Yoel to wriggle out of his grip, but Yoel rested his head on Yonatan’s chest and stared at the treetops around them.
He took two breaths, which shifted Yoel’s head slightly, then pushed him off and stood facing him. He stuck two cigarettes between his lips, lit them and handed one to Yoel. Yoel had gained weight, his cheeks looked chubby, and his curly hair was full of gray and white. For years Yonatan had gathered signs, mourning the passing time with Yoel—in fact more so than Yoel, whose observations were mitigated by a layer of irony and dark humor, with quotes from Bartleby or Lenin. But after Itamar was born, he began to accept these signs as the natural order of things, and the passage of time they’d always feared stopped haunting him. Or perhaps, as Yoel said, he’d simply given up.
“I know I shouldn’t show you this because you’ll flip out,” Yoel said, “but let me show you, just take a look for ten minutes and tell me what you think, you know I’d do it for you.”
“I’ve looked at those fucking notebooks a million times.”
“Just once. Ten minutes, man.”
“No.”
“I’ve read every book you’ve written.”
“It’s not the same thing, and you know it,” Yonatan retorted, surprised.
“Not everything in them is accurate, it should be noted.”
His skin prickled, he looked at Yoel: all this was unfamiliar and ominous. Yoel rarely voiced any criticism of his novels. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Certain events in the books might not have occurred exactly in the way you’ve written them. You’ve never been very careful about being faithful to the truth, if we’re being honest.” Yoel gave a sort of giggle. “It was always kind of cute.”
“They are novels, you know.” How pathetic his answer sounded.
Yoel gave him a long stare, and for a moment his face took on a more lucid expression, reminiscent of when they used to work together on something. “Come on, don’t talk to me like I’m one of those sweaty students in your writing workshops. You write those things because they happened. Dystopia, utopia, historical fiction—I can always see what you’re really writing about.”
Yonatan could not think of a response that wouldn’t seem affected. The old Yoel, not the one standing before him now, had always been able to change the mood but Yonatan didn’t have it in him now to do a magic trick. Yoel must have sensed his paralysis. He perked up and put on a mask of laughter. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter at all. You, from the ashes of our childhood, you produce miracles.” He looked around at the people on Rabin Square, then called out, “See how they applaud you!”
A few people gave them puzzled looks. Their familiar hyperbolic tone always emerged in tense moments. Yoel used it especially, attacking Yonatan with jabs and hints and then taking them back or at least denying their severity. It was strange that Yonatan preferred that tone, even though he knew that what Yoel had said before, which he hadn’t completely understood, was what mattered. “Everyone knows you are a venerable leader,” he told Yoel, completing the ritual. He looked at his watch and wondered if the baby was asleep yet. Sometimes they still called him ‘the baby.’
“Just look at the notebook one more time, old sport,” Yoel pleaded. “Be a real friend for once.”
“I’ve already told you, I’m done with those notebooks,” he snapped.
“It doesn’t matter anyway, you’re not going to improve me,” Yoel said in a creaky voice. “I’m beyond help. So take a look, it’ll help a little.”
“I swear things will get better.”
“People are pushed to their deaths while they polish their silver and read the newspaper.”
“That’s the only quote you remember.”
“I like that line.”
“You’ll like other lines too.”
“I’m going to die really soon.”
In perfect synchrony, they tossed their burning cigarettes onto the street.