The rain stopped and the sky arched over him. He could see the horizon brightening over the edge of the hills. When the darkness tore open the earth and the sky separated, the wadi’s stark borders—to the east the first trees of the wood near his school, in the center the square building of the Academy of Music, and to the west the fences surrounding the military factory—became visible. A pain sliced his back. He slid his right hand under his body and felt a sharp stone. With some effort he pulled it out of the ground. The weight of his wet clothes was oppressive. As long as he lay without moving a single limb, his body did not hurt, but when he shifted his hand or foot, his flesh burned.
How many hours had he been lying there? He glanced to the right and recognized the two white rocks with tops that looked like chicken combs, the bushes colored gray by the dust in summer, which they used to kick thick clouds out of, and the swath of velvety mud where they’d dug the trench in the winter of sixth grade. He strained his memory, expecting the black screen to tear open and reveal when he’d arrived in that spot. He knew it must have been in the past few hours that he’d crossed the dirt lot between their street and the wadi. But he was beset by a muddle of habitual scenes devoid of chronology: he locks the front door, he talks on the phone with his father in New York, he starts the car.
He coughed, and the cold tightened around his feet as if they were covered with ice. He struggled to move them. He knew he had to get up and leave immediately.
He rolled onto his stomach and his shoulder spasmed in pain. He saw little stones, weeds, smooth mounds of mud. He put his hands on the earth, pushed his body up into a kneeling position, stifling a yelp, though he could have screamed as much as he wanted and no one would have heard. He stood up, examined his muddy palms and black fingernails, then ran his fingers over his stomach and thighs, pinching and rubbing the flesh to warm up. He was pleased now—he had managed to will himself off the ground, and even if he could not remember the events that had led him there, shreds of memory would soon form.
He heard a distant engine, a baby wailing, a door slamming. The darkness of night had not yet left the sky, and he estimated it was about six o’clock. What day was it? Did he have school? The morning noises prodded him to turn around and walk to the meeting point between the wadi and the dirt lot, exactly where he’d been standing when Shaul had shouted at him during a soccer game to let Noam score the goal and not rush at him; the next thing he knew, his face was bloodied, and Shaul was carrying him to their front yard, where everyone stood around while Shaul washed his face with a hose and stroked his hair and screamed that he’d said not to rush, and begged him not to tell Mom and Dad.
When he got closer to the dirt lot he saw his car parked there, its front wheels deep in the mud. His black shoes were also covered with mud. He looked at his clothes: the gray wool pants he often wore in the evenings were covered with thick brown stains, the back of the wool coat he wore over a blue striped sweater was the color of the earth. He was dressed for a night out, maybe in one of the pubs at the Russian Compound downtown. Maybe he’d had too much to drink or smoke, and when he’d come home, instead of parking in the lot and going upstairs, he’d left the car at the edge of the wadi and lain down. He searched his coat pockets for the car keys but couldn’t find them. He wondered if he should go back to the wadi, until he remembered something: he sped up, and through the car window he saw the keys on the driver’s seat.
He sat down at the wheel and started the engine, then angled the rearview mirror toward the seat next to him, afraid to look at his face.
He turned the car around, and spotted Yoel walking toward him. Yoel’s hands were in his pockets, he wore a wool hat, with a few shiny wet curls clinging to his forehead. He had on one of the checkered sweater vests people said he borrowed from his father, and no coat. Yonatan blinked; the Yoel he saw seemed as dreamlike as those kids around the table. The sweater vest was too familiar: the Yoel of his dreams always wore it. Pictures from the past—dreams, hallucinations—had started piling up inside him. Perhaps this was what madness was: opening your eyes in the middle of the street and seeing past, present and future all at once.
Yoel stood in the middle of the dirt lot. The branches of the last tree on the street swayed, and its trampled leaves, blackened by winter, fluttered on the ground around him. His doubts vanished and he drove toward Yoel. He could still swerve to the right or left and drive around him. Yoel glanced to either side, then looked at Yonatan as if to warn him: you wouldn’t do something so pathetic, would you?
He stopped the car. Yoel placed his hands on the engine hood. A breeze whipped up his hair, and Yonatan saw black leaves soaring to the balconies, the roofs and the treetops. The dirt lot looked small, at the mercy of the towers and giant trees surrounding it.
Yoel got into the passenger seat and sat down next to him, wiped his eyes, which were tearing up from the wind, and starting fiddling with the air-conditioning controls, as he always did. Hot air blew at them. “Is it reaching you?” Yoel asked and held his hand out, then lowered it to Yonatan’s knees and briefly fluttered over his pants, which were caked with hardened mud. Yoel’s touch reminded Yonatan of the pain that now sharpened again, hitting his bones. Yoel was freshly shaved and his skin smelled of aftershave, probably Jazz. His sideburns were cut exactly at the line of his ears and they curved onto his cheeks. Yonatan stared at his filthy hands and looked around for something to wipe them on.
“Going somewhere?” Yoel asked.
He remembered that he was going to visit Yaara today. “Yes, somewhere.”
“Looking like Mudman?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“What are you doing here, Yoel?” he pressed. “It’s six a.m. isn’t it?”
“Quarter to six,” Yoel replied. Neither of them ever wore a watch. “I haven’t seen you at school for three days, you don’t answer the phone, you even missed the soldiers who came to tell us about the Armored Corps.”
“It’s funny that you would talk about disappearing,” Yonatan responded. “You’re the one who goes missing for three days sometimes.”
“That hardly ever happens anymore,” Yoel said.
“It happened two months ago.”
“Forget about that, my dear,” Yoel said with a giggle. “A guy has trouble sleeping and rests in his room for a while, thinking things over, as they say, and you make a big fuss.”
“Okay, but what are you doing here now?”
“Sometimes you wake up early,” Yoel said, and a glimmer flashed in his eyes as he savored the obvious lie. Yonatan realized that Yoel had seen him sleeping in the trench. It was strange that he hadn’t woken him and taken him home. He must have been watching from his living room balcony and waiting for Yonatan to wake up. He wondered if Tali had also seen him asleep in the wadi.
Yoel rubbed his hands together and grumbled about the car’s heating. Yonatan thought: Yoel moves too much, it’s annoying.
“So where are we going?” Yoel asked cheerfully.
“We aren’t going anywhere,” he snapped.
“Because you want to be alone with your new girlfriend?”
“Maybe.”
“The new girlfriend from Herzliya?”
“Tel Aviv.”
“The lovely Yaara.”
“Correct.”
“My children: believe in youth!” Yoel sang out. They both knew the line; he’d written it on one of the kingdom notes, when the Army Minister had asked him to cheer up the young soldiers freezing on their behalf in the Land of Twelve Skeletons.
“Stop fucking around, okay,” Yonatan said. It irritated him that Yoel used their notes like that, stripping them of their glory. He was too proud to admit that he lamented the kingdom and thought they shouldn’t have abandoned it to lie frozen and silenced.
“Interesting how she never comes to visit you in Jerusalem.”
“I’m afraid she’ll see you and fall in love.”
“Have you fucked yet?”
He didn’t answer. Yoel had taken to talking freely about sex, chatting about blowjobs and fucking and how he liked to go down on a girl and lick her to make her climax. He’d asked Yonatan how he made Lior cum. Yonatan tried to answer naturally, but it was clear to both of them that he was embarrassed and that Yoel enjoyed teasing him. He once waved a popsicle at Yonatan and said, “Show me how you lick her,” and Yonatan sounded like an idiot when he hissed, “That’s none of your business.”
The other boys didn’t talk like Yoel, at least not with him, and Yoel said everyone at school was horribly puritanical, that they fucked like their Polish parents, and he’d bet there wasn’t a single guy who knew how to lick a girl properly, except maybe some of the unpopular kids, who had no image to maintain and nothing to lose. “It’s just a theory,” he added with a smile.
Yoel’s crack about the puritans was clearly also aimed at Yonatan, which was another sign of how he’d changed. Sometime in their junior year Yoel had started sharing his personal charm with the world. He did it capriciously, like a superhero who has yet to discover his power, or like Balzac’s young protagonists, whom they learned about in literature class: characters who have no idea why peopled lavish them with favors. At recess, more and more boys and girls surrounded Yoel, either to amuse him or to draw out his wit and turn it into common property. Yoel could make anyone believe that they had at least one unique trait. He instilled a sense of self-worth in people, even as he showered them with hollow compliments whose implicit irony no one stopped to consider before mindlessly repeating them: “Everyone’s in your court,” or “There’s no question that you interest people.” Yonatan started hearing Yoel’s lines in the school hallways, parroted by kids he didn’t know. The ground was laid for Yoel’s great leap to the summit, at least among those kids that he and Yoel jokingly referred to as “the working class”—the majority of kids in the middle who were neither particularly popular nor unpopular. He knew that Yoel would soon understand everything, and then his charm would burst out with nightmarish force.
Sometimes he felt that each time they met, he was encountering a slightly different character. Yoel was always trying out a new gesture or imitating a style of speech he liked, constantly refining. Whereas Yonatan only posed as someone else, while deep down he clung to the same old insights that, although never explicitly questioned by Yoel, were challenged by the changes in his conduct. Lior said that Yoel wasn’t really changing that much, it was just that Yonatan saw it and it scared him, because their world at the end of the block was running out of time. “Another girl already said that six years ago,” he answered.
Two cars drove out of his building’s parking lot and sailed up the street. A few people emerged into their front yards.
“You don’t have a girlfriend in Herzliya, and I’ll bet a hundred shekels you don’t have one in Tel Aviv either,” Yoel said.
Ratzon Dahari from downstairs walked out with his little girl, who was talking loudly and waving her hands around, and Yonatan marveled at them. In his enfeebled state, all these morning scenes struck him as tremendous, just as, when he’d been a child lying in bed with a fever, the ceiling had grown enormous and dome-like, and every time he looked at it the distance between him and it had shrunk. Yoel got out of the car but Yonatan stayed glued to his seat, still focused on finding a retort to hurl at him and prove Yaara’s existence. But the bitter, sober taste was already in his mouth: there was no longer any point in the grandiose denial he was plotting. He wondered if Lior knew too. Maybe when she’d asked him on the phone if he’d seen Yaara, she already knew there was no Yaara.
He remembered the last time they’d sat in the car on an empty street, last summer: they’d taken the road leading to the Knesset and then to the Israel Museum. The drumbeat from “Rocket Queen” thudded in the rear speakers, and a wild current warmed his body the way it always did when he heard that song. Intoxicating stabs of dream fragments flashed through his mind, and the looming months of desolate boredom looked so predictable, so dead. They talked about the trips they might take together, and Yoel said it was very possible that, thanks to the peace progress, a few years from now boys like them—in the summer between their junior and senior years—would drive to Jordan and Syria, maybe even Lebanon. They could leave in the morning and be in Damascus or Beirut by afternoon, and they’d spend the evening clubbing or hang out at Turkish baths. It would be just like in the US, where you could get in your car and drive across an endless expanse and no one ever stopped you. “Only then will we understand how suffocated we were before,” Yoel said, “how everything was small and closing in on us and we couldn’t do anything.”
After the Guns N’ Roses and Metallica shows at Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv, they started enthusing about the nineties. It seemed to them that the provincial Israel they’d grown up in, surrounded by adults who were seduced by the brightly colored enticements of New York, London and California, yet convinced of the West’s fundamental corruption and the moral supremacy of their own socialist values—was ripped to shreds. The Beit HaKerem parents were mostly civil servants, professors, politicians, teachers, doctors, journalists, as well as two lawyers and one therapist. There was something about them that was faded, with their Israeli-made clothes, “billowy floral blouses in the colors of winter, or Gypsy dresses,” as his mother said. They all avoided the type of attention that might attract gossip. These were the people who had fashioned Beit HaKerem of the eighties—with its sing-alongs, its poppies and sunflowers, its nature hikes, it youth movements, its socialist role models, its disdain of anyone who was showy or garrulous, and its underlying guilt about not living on a kibbutz.
At their high school, where there were kids from all over Jerusalem, they’d met the sons and daughters of businessmen and entrepreneurs, partners in big law or accounting firms, importers of cars, clothes and jewelry, engineers and architects in the private sector. These people wore expensive suits and drove Mercedes and popped over to Europe for winter vacations, they bought buildings and hotels and restaurants, they read books by successful businessmen, and they even lived in houses with pools.
Yoel said that in Beit HaKerem there were people whose power was unrelated to money, while at school they met people who were wealthy, but didn’t really influence anything. And it was the latter who set the tone for the nineties, when everything seemed to be happening all at once: at the mall they saw signs for McDonalds; in the papers they read about international hotel chains and clothing stores opening branches in Israel; they heard of Jerusalem businessmen sealing all sorts of deals around the world; two kids from their class left when their parents got jobs in Geneva and Rome. Things seemed possible.
Yoel and Yonatan maintained that until the early nineties, Israelis’ yen for the West had been accompanied by a recognition of their remoteness, whereas now everyone believed that, thanks to their improved relations with the Arab world, they now had a seat in the world—albeit at a side table. There had always been in-the-know kids who read stories in American magazines about bands or movie stars or WWF wrestlers, or just made them up, and who could inform everyone that Axl Rose had shot his dog while Guns N’ Roses were on tour with Metallica, or that the Undertaker had hired an assassin to murder Mister Perfect. But these mediators were no longer needed, since now everyone could watch MTV and get the same information.
As they discussed the trips they could have taken if only history had come slightly sooner, and looked up at the night sky above the museum, Yonatan backed up at a traffic light and broke the headlight of the car behind them. They got out and the driver, a woman of around thirty-five, asked to see his license. When he told her he’d left it at home, she said, “You don’t have a license, do you?” She looked around—he was relieved there was no pay phone—and said she was going to call the police. At home in his sock drawer, Yonatan had $250 that his brother had left him on his last visit, and he offered her the money. He wasn’t scared of his parents but he did fear the police, because if they got involved he wouldn’t be able to get his coveted license for years.
Yoel asked how many kids she had, and she answered begrudgingly, “Two.” When he asked what their names were, she said it was none of his business. Then he heard Yoel say, “My friend would never tell you this, but his mother is very ill. It would be a shame to add to his sorrows.” His boyish tone was tinged with a deep, sober bass, the kind used by grown-ups who really knew the world and said things like “May you know no more sorrow” to mourners.
Yonatan wanted to see the expression on Yoel’s face, but he did not look at him. He couldn’t remember when they’d discussed his mother’s illness. Yoel knew he didn’t talk about it, and he’d stopped asking questions.
“Is that true?” she asked Yonatan.
“Yes, it’s true.”
She followed them to Beit HaKerem, and they did not say a word the whole way. The road curved, and the cars hurtling toward them from the opposite direction looked too close, and the sky too dark. He had trouble keeping the car steady. They pulled over, and he got out and ran up home. When he came back with the cash, he found Yoel and the woman leaning against the hood sharing a cigarette, while Yoel told her his favorite story. It was about a Moorish ruler setting sail from Grenada, after losing the last Muslim stronghold in a battle on the Iberian Peninsula. As he sat there crying inconsolably, his mother scolded: “Don’t wail like a woman over the place you did not protect like a man.”
Then Yoel asked the woman if she thought he should go out with Tali—he’d apparently been talking about her—and she said she thought he should, it sounded like he loved her. Yoel, sounding utterly cheerless, said he’d wasted too much time making up his mind, and now Tali was dating a paratrooper.
“Don’t worry,” the woman said tenderly, “when you really want it, you’ll get the chance.”
Yoel rubbed his hands together. “It’ll be too late then. It’s already too late.”
The woman laughed. “You’re not even eighteen yet, nothing’s too late.”
Yoel straightened and said, “I can’t sleep. I toss and turn with these questions like some miserable obsessive. I make a decision at dawn and then it starts all over again. Know what I mean?”
The woman said nothing, as though she’d suddenly decided this was not just another youthful escapade. Yonatan couldn’t see Yoel’s expression; he wondered why he hadn’t told him about his sleepless nights. But then again, he didn’t tell Yoel much either.
They stood silently for a while, until Yoel assumed the character of a pestering old man, and shouted: “Lady, such applause they’re giving you!” Then he added, “It’s a good thing my clumsy friend broke your headlight, ’cause you’ve been pretty helpful, to be honest.”
She laughed, sounding relieved, and patted Yoel’s arm and said he was cute.
Yonatan was not surprised by this exchange. It was not the first time Yoel had asked complete strangers, usually older ones, for advice on a troubling situation—his relationship with Tali, or his army service, even his future vocation. Sometimes he urged them to make a decision for him, and a month or two later he’d ask a different stranger the exact same question.
Yoel walked around the car and opened the driver’s door and asked Yonatan to get out. He obeyed, and Yoel linked arms with him and walked him to the edge of the dirt lot, where their warm breath turned to vapor as they stood looking out onto the wadi.
“Where are your parents?” Yoel asked.
“New York.”
“Is your mom getting treatment?”
“Yes.”
“How’s she doing?”
“They’re taking care of her,” he answered grudgingly.
“They’ve been gone for a long time.”
“Three weeks.”
“I can imagine what the house looks like.”
“Want to see?”
“I don’t know, I’m on the blacklist for your place. I haven’t been there in a million years.”
“Since Yom Kippur.”
When his mom got sick, she didn’t want his friends hanging around at home, especially not Yoel, whom she’d never liked—a fact she no longer tried to hide—and Yonatan didn’t insist on having anyone visit except Lior, who slept over in his room every so often. His mother accepted her presence reluctantly, and complained that she had to calculate her every move when Lior was there because she didn’t want a strange girl seeing her in a weakened state and hearing all sorts of things. But she made an effort to welcome her.
Once, after Lior witnessed a tense exchange between Yonatan and his parents, he told her about some things his mother sometimes blurted out when they fought. A few months later, when he mentioned that his father was demanding that he “adapt to the new situation already,” Lior said she couldn’t understand how they expected a young boy who’d been told by his mother he had the eyes of a Gestapo officer to start behaving properly. She got the words out quickly, before she could change her mind, and he stared at her as she walked onto the balcony for a cigarette, having realized the gravity of what she’d said.
“But that’s just what she says when we fight,” he said, hurrying after her. “I say terrible things too, you know.” He carelessly listed a few of his sins, but Lior’s words rang in his ears as he spoke. He felt despicable for giving her the idea that the order of things was different than it really was, or that he was the one who’d been wronged.
Yoel spat in a perfect arc at a rock about fifteen feet away. From the east they saw a figure walking on the narrow path between their school and the woods. They’d recently started paving a new road there, to connect the school with what was going to be the tallest building in the neighborhood: at least a dozen stories, they said, with smooth white siding instead of the customary rough Jerusalem stone. “Remember when they rolled me in the mud and thistles?” Yoel asked, pointing at the distant figure. “In a few years there’ll be cars driving there.”
Fascinated, Yonatan gazed at Yoel’s hand. It wasn’t up where he was pointing that they’d rolled him in the mud, but right here, near where they stood, a few yards from the trench. But Yoel’s outstretched hand still pointed far up, maybe even at the horizon over the woods. Yonatan felt like pushing that hand down to the earth. Yoel exhaled, hugged his body, and rubbed his arms. “It really is cold, goddammit,” he mumbled. Two girls climbed up the hill across the way, skipping from rock to rock to avoid the mud.
Yoel opened his eyes wide. They were both shivering now. “Everyone lies sometimes,” he said.
Yonatan turned to look back at the wadi, now engulfed in a lethargy that dulled everything. A voice inside him told him to go to sleep, promising that if he lay down in his parents’ bed with the space heater on, he would remember nothing of this morning tomorrow. Or perhaps he would drag it into a dream burrow. It was possible: there were no barriers between things that happened and things that were dreamed or invented, in the end they all blended together in the mind’s swamp. It was only Yoel who demanded separation, interrogating him about Yaara, seeking truth and lies. Was there any way for them to even know?
“Do you want to go?” he heard Yoel say.
“Yes,” he replied.
He felt Yoel’s arm around his shoulder, and when he turned he saw that Yoel’s face and sweater were also streaked with mud. He was surprised that Yoel hadn’t complained. A piercing look flashed in Yoel’s eyes again. “We’ll go wherever you want,” he said.
——
After the last houses of French Hill, the landscape slowly folded in until everything around them was brushed with tar-black paint. They made their way along a narrow, dark street, at times imagining they were suspended in mid-air surrounded by an abyss, and when the headlights illuminated the desert around them, with cliffs and hills and rocks, they felt relieved because the car seemed to tighten its grip on the ground. On previous trips the sky had felt high, with a multitude of twinkling stars, and jets of light that burst forth and exploded into radiant little spheres. For some reason they’d assumed it would always look like that when they drove out here at night. But now they saw no stars, only dark swaths of clouds that got closer to the earth as they drove on. Yoel, who was driving, said that if something didn’t change, the sky would soon crush the road.
The rings of smoke from their cigarettes hung in the car. Yonatan rolled down the window and a cold breeze hit them. He rolled it back up and lit another cigarette, then examined his face in the lighter’s flame: he was wearing four silver earrings, two chains with pendants of swords and a cross, and two rings. He looked to his left as if he couldn’t remember: Yoel wore no jewelry.
Earlier, at home, after Yoel threw his muddy pants in the trash and said he was better off never seeing them again, Yonatan took a scalding hot shower and scrubbed his entire body to wipe off any sign of the wadi. He asked Yoel to stay in the bathroom with him, and they shouted at each other through the curtain. He was amazed at how calm he felt knowing that Yoel was there.
Then they sat on the living room couch, swept all the trash off the glass-top table with their bare feet, and drank vodka out of Styrofoam cups that Yoel found in the cabinet because he refused to go near the kitchen sink. Yonatan assumed Yoel was disgusted by the mess, since his home was always clean, and even if he pretended not to be influenced by his parents, he had trouble hiding his aversion to dirty dishes or the pita they used to bake in a forest clearing on school trips, with pine needles clumped to it.
It was noon, and it started raining again. He remembered Yaara and his visit. Yoel hadn’t mentioned her again, but everyone would soon find out his lie. His body felt tense, the exuberance was gone, and something in his mind shuddered again, shaken by the terror of the abundance, of the noise, of everything that seethed and simmered and ignited inside it.
They finished drinking, catapulted their cups at the empty vase on the wooden cabinet, and moved to his parents’ room. As they lay there watching music videos on MTV, waiting to catch Alicia Silverstone in “Cryin’”, Yoel said maybe they should take a nap, since it probably hadn’t been great to sleep on the mud in the wadi. His tone of voice, implying that they had all the time in the world, made Yonatan’s fears disappear. But he still did not have the courage to tell Yoel what he felt: You won’t leave, will you?
Yoel drove off the road and stopped the car. Yonatan looked out and his gaze was swallowed up in an all-embracing darkness; he had no idea where they were. The headlights shone on a cliff with a sharpened peak and large, reddish rocks on either side, which looked like three rock faces—a father and his twins. To the south, far beyond the road, distant lights glimmered, perhaps from the outskirts of Jericho. He felt weighed down, and had trouble calming his breath. All day long his spirits had been rising and falling in a frenetic whirlwind. Perhaps all his efforts to get through these days were pointless, as they were only a gateway to more days that would bring worse news.
Protected by the twilight in between decisions, he admitted that he feared the moment when his parents would come back from New York and he would have to look at his mother. He’d seen the years since her diagnosis as a hallway that led to only one end, yet in his core there was still a glimmer of hope—to which he sometimes surrendered, savoring its warmth—that things that happened to other people would not happen to them. That they would be saved. So he was in no hurry to urge his mother to tell him the secrets she had sworn she would reveal when he grew up. He never painted the picture after her death. Even when he decided he had to examine it, that he had no choice but to prepare, it looked very blurry. He believed they still had time.
“Are you okay?” Yoel asked softly.
Yonatan found his tone infuriating. As though he were speaking to a patient. “I don’t know,” he whispered.
“You’re not going to do something extreme, are you?” Yoel asked.
“That’s what you’re worried about?” He let out a laugh.
“Partly.”
“Then don’t be.”
“End of story.”
“Have you seen Lior recently?” he couldn’t resist asking.
“Where would I see her, you ass,” Yoel exclaimed with a truncated laugh.
“With Tali’s friends. You hang out with them.”
“I hang out with Tali.”
“Are you fucking her?”
“Where did that come from?”
“I saw her leaving your building early in the morning once.”
“That…” Yoel stuck his tongue out. “I’m just comforting our Tali a little because her parents are splitting up.”
“How are you comforting her?”
“We’re fucking,” Yoel laughed, “but forget that, you rascal, you don’t understand Tali—that chick has more hobbies than Laura Palmer.”
“Are you together or not?”
“You know how it goes, you told me once I was the champion of undefined relationships.”
“But do you want to be her boyfriend?”
“It’s unclear.”
“It’s been unclear for two years.”
“At least four,” Yoel said glumly. “It’s driving me crazy, I’m scratching the walls with my fingernails.”
There was a silence.
“So you are hanging out with her and her friends?”
“Most of the time we’re with other people,” Yoel insisted.
“What other people?”
“You don’t know them.”
“It’s hard to be popular.”
“Less than you think.”
They both laughed.
Yonatan was formulating the question that would trap Yoel, but he hoped Yoel would get away—it was what he hadn’t dared ask him in two months. “Is Lior seeing someone?”
“Stop going crazy.”
“Don’t lie. Not now.”
“Remember, my friends: when you wear the right mask, every lie is the truth.”
“Stop quoting!” Yonatan lost his temper again at the way Yoel glibly mouthed their kingdom notes.
“Because?” Yoel grumbled.
“You’ve turned into a collection of quotes, you’re always imitating someone.”
“Okay, okay,” Yoel said with a joyless giggle, “I’ve heard this one before. A month ago you told me my soul was hollow because the beginning of ‘Fade to Black’ doesn’t do anything for me.”
“Is she seeing someone, yes or no?” he pressed.
“I heard she was going around with someone for a while,” Yoel answered stingily.
“From where?”
“The arts school.”
A gust rocked the car slightly. Yoel put both hands on the windshield and wiped off the steam.
“Did she sleep with him?” He hoped Yoel would evade the question.
“Probably not.”
“How much exactly did they do?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know, I heard he’s a kid, a junior, like Lior and Tali. Some tortured soul who wears all black and plays guitar ballads. You know the genre.”
“Just tell me everything already!” Yonatan yelled. Something passed between the beams of light, far away, between the three cliff faces. It might have been a gazelle, but he couldn’t see clearly. He turned off the lights, pushed the door open and got out. The wind attacked him and he couldn’t hear anything as he walked over stones, tripping in his rush to where he thought the cliff faces were. It occurred to him that he could disappear tonight, vanish into the great darkness—he was already hidden between its wings. The picture cheered him up even as it frightened him. He heard the car door slam shut and Yoel’s footsteps came closer, then there was the sound of someone panting behind him, or perhaps it was the wind—since when had Yoel got so fast? He sped up, no longer noticing the stones, but Yoel grabbed his shoulder and shouted something. He stopped. Yoel spun him around to face him.
They stood on a sandy hill. He had trouble making out the outline of Yoel’s body, which kept fading in and out of the darkness. For the first time that night, he saw a few faded stars between the clouds.
They stood there silently for some time. He couldn’t see the car, didn’t even know exactly where the road was.
“Was Lior happy with you?” Yoel suddenly asked.
“How should I know?” Now he suspected Yoel knew something else.
“Did you ever think about it?”
“Did she tell you she wasn’t?”
“No, I swear,” Yoel answered, “I saw her once, not long ago, we were both too drunk to remember what year it was.”
A car approached and they both moved out of the headlight beams. It seemed to be slowing down. Then it lurched forward with a screech, zoomed past them and disappeared. “They were as scared of us as we were of them,” Yonatan laughed. Not long ago, some Israelis had been killed by a car bomb nearby.
“I had no idea you were still so worked up about her,” Yoel said.
“Of course you didn’t, you thought I was just making up the story about Yaara.”
“I assumed you’d had a thing with her.”
“We held hands on the kibbutz.” He kicked the clumpy earth.
“That’s not nothing. How come you didn’t do anything afterwards?”
“I wanted to, but she’d already gone back to her boyfriend.”
“So you just embellished,” Yoel said.
“Why would I do that?” he asked indignantly.
“Are you seriously asking?”
“Yes,” he said. He wanted to hear Yoel say it.
“Because it’s what we always did.” Obviously Yoel could not understand why Yonatan was forcing him to state the obvious. Yonatan felt relieved that he could not see Yoel’s expression. There was something stunned in his voice, as though it were the first time he had discovered the chasm that had opened up between them. Yoel coughed, and he lit a cigarette. The flame lit up his flushed face. He coughed again and spat on the sand. His coat and pants were wet. It must have rained.
“There’s nothing to embellish,” Yonatan said, “the whole thing was made up, and everything’s a lie anyway, or isn’t it anymore for you? You’re done with the lies, you’ve retired to your estate, the war is over.”
He heard Yoel’s footsteps circling him. “You can still talk to a friend in this world,” Yoel said.
“Remember the rules: you don’t dig around in the pain. When the world doesn’t give you what you want, you fake a new world.”
“That was once,” Yoel said.
“That is always.”
“We’re not twelve anymore,” Yoel hissed, as if the last line had aggravated an old anger that he couldn’t rein in, not even now.
“You don’t really believe that, do you, Yoel?” Yonatan laughed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Are you telling me you’ve left all that behind?”
“I’m not going to wallow in that trench forever,” Yoel said, “and neither are you.”
“Since when is it up to us?”
“Stop this bullshit already.”
“So it’s not us against everyone else anymore? Then tell me if she’s seeing someone. Tell me if she even loved me.”
Suddenly Yoel was very close to him, hugging him with both arms. His warm hands seemed to quiet Yonatan’s pounding heart. “That is forever,” Yoel whispered, “you won’t be alone.”
He became convinced that these words were merely adorning the moment, and that there would soon be another moment. That is what their words always were: flighty reflections of the moment, devoted to it, their severity fading as the days went by. They knew it only too well: words create a world and then it collapses, or is declared boring, and another world is created. That is what they had chosen to be: men of temporary loyalties. Of course he wanted to believe Yoel, but he knew that tomorrow or the next day this moment would dissolve into the routine of loneliness, and perhaps it would have been better if they hadn’t met at all today, because when the illusion is over you are slammed back into the bottom of the abyss, and it’s a deeper one.
Yoel gripped his shoulder with one hand, and mussed his hair with the other. It felt familiar. You, he wanted to tell Yoel, you’re different now, so stop being so familiar. He feared the strip of light in the sky—the nights were getting shorter—that would signal the approaching dawn, because he didn’t want them ever to leave this night. It was something of a phantom night, present both here and in all of their other times, because every meeting between them was a melding of all their times together into one burgeoning moment—a thousand past-screams against a feeble present whimper—and he himself, alone, was no longer enough.