He called Shira and explained that something was stirring after a long period of not writing—a year and a half, he told people, but it was more than two—and said he had to cultivate the seed before it withered, as all the previous seeds had, and only return to Tel Aviv “when something is really taking shape.” He wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth or playing the last card that could keep him in Mexico City for a few more days, but after that call he felt obliged to dust off his keyboard and run a cloth over the filthy screen. Also—to turn on the computer.
After breakfast he sat down at the desk in his room. The chair was too high for the desk, so he perched his laptop on some folded towels, but he still had to hunch. In the late morning he moved to a wooden table by the pool, where he sipped an espresso, smoked a cigarette, and ordered a beer as soon as the clock showed noon. When the noise around the pool became too loud, he relocated to a stone bench by the bubbling fountain in front of the hotel, where he focused on the screen and listened to car engines, people conversing in various languages, and suitcase wheels rolling on the asphalt.
He summoned up patches of ideas, characters and scenes that had flittered around his mind for the past two years. When nothing came into focus, he searched his notes and computer files, even little memos he’d saved on his phone. He found some raw ideas, but when he tried to write them, they aroused nothing. He knew that it’s often possible to write something that is actually dead, and you only become aware of it later, when it fails to stimulate you or whip up your imagination, when it does not flood you with contemplations and insights, does not erupt in your mind.
The next morning he sat down at his desk again, and for hours nothing happened, but when he moved to the pool he started writing a short story that did excite him, perhaps because it branched off from the childhood dream about the boy with a plank lodged in his throat. He worked on the story all day, and some parts even amused him, but back in his room that night, when he read over what he’d written, he found that many sentences were similar to passages in his previous books. A few were identical, others just using the same ending—like different tunnels that all lead to the same room. It was as though he were trapped in language and imagery from the past, unable to find a voice that would not echo something he’d already written. There was a sort of drabness engulfing him, in which he lacked the power to create a new world.
On the third day, in the early morning, he was still revising the story, but after a couple of hours he deleted the file. He looked at the white screen, awaiting clarity but not really expecting it. As the hours went by he grew weary and disgusted with the feel of his fingers on the sticky keyboard. At three in the afternoon he sat down at the bar, savoring its darkness, drank a vodka tonic and a tequila, stared at the screen, and eventually found himself playing memory games, something his father had taught him. To protect his memory from aging, calcifying, dissolving into a porridge of fragments, every night before bed his father listed the names of the soccer players who had lined up for Maccabi Petah Tikva against Maccabi Tel Aviv in 1952, he listed all the Oscar winners throughout the sixties, all the kids who’d been in first grade with him.
“The game isn’t about pivotal memories,” his father explained, “but simple things. The point is just to flex the muscle.”
There were some things his father did not remember: what his mother had said about Yonatan when she was ill. Whenever he asked, his father measured his words and said nothing Yonatan didn’t know or couldn’t have guessed, and always slid, as if by accident, into the years before Yonatan was born. At first he’d assumed his father was avoiding memories he thought neither of them really wanted to pick at because they would only stir up old tensions and drive a wedge between them. They’d spent years learning to maneuver among the embers that had only to be accidentally touched for the atmosphere to heat up. Recently he’d realized that his mother must not have talked about him much, and that his father was trying to protect him from learning this.
He sat at the bar playing the game. Community center soccer game scores: 5-6 against Beit Nehemiah, 2-2 against Nikanor, 1-6 loss to Beit Pomerantz in an away game, a match Shaul had watched. There was sewage leaking all over the field. Purim costumes from first to sixth grade: cowboy, cowboy, cowboy, ninja, ninja or pirate, cowboy, pirate or ninja.
At his thirty-fifth birthday dinner, he’d decided he’d had enough of all the vague talk. He said he’d been thinking about things, and it was pretty clear to him that his mother had exaggerated when she used to describe him as a wild boy, a mean one even, who tormented her. After all, if you looked at the overall picture, he might have been annoying and rude and all that, but he was also pretty ordinary. His father listened with open discomfort, and finally interrupted to say that Yonatan had been a non-functional kid: he’d never stuck with anything, he was always cursing people, and it wasn’t just Mom who’d said so, his teachers had too, and they’d even tried to kick him out of summer camp in Ein Karem. Yonatan was surprised to learn that, although his father had avoided the topic for years, when he was prodded into talking candidly, he turned out to be committed to the picture his mother had painted.
Yoel, who was sitting next to Yonatan’s father that evening, stood up, picked up his knife, clanged his wineglass and said that, if he might be permitted to interfere, their positions were not mutually exclusive. He declared that it was admirable for a father and son to be able to talk honestly—even if some might argue that this was not exactly the ideal time—because, as the Talmudic saying goes, a knife is only sharpened on another knife. In his family, he said, this sort of discussion would never happen, and in fact he was somewhat envious of it. Or perhaps horrified…Everyone smiled, and the tension at the table dissipated. It was hard to resist Yoel’s charm, and he was somehow even more appealing when he said things he didn’t believe in, speaking with an overwrought gravity that sent a message to everyone: we are playing a game here, juggling words, not meanings. Then he delivered a lengthy speech in honor of Yonatan’s birthday and waxed nostalgic, as if he were trying to bore everyone, and finished off with a quote from one of their kingdom notes: “This world is a game, it’s pointless to search for truth or lies in it, so just play and quit whining.”
That was the last time he’d seen Yoel before “the lost months,” as his close friends called the period between when each of them last saw him and when he moved in with his parents. He saw almost no one during those months. He quit his job, told some people he was going away for a while, and others that he had another job or was on vacation. He told Tali, mostly in writing, that he was a little depressed and was planning his next move. And then he simply disappeared, shaking everyone off. No one knew exactly how he spent those days, but he seemed to have mostly been lying in bed in his Tel Aviv apartment, and he made one solo trip to the desert. His parents and sister began visiting him every day, and finally they took him home to Jerusalem.
Every time Yoel’s friends talked, they returned to those lost months, even now, two years later. They searched for clues they’d missed that summer, when they were still seeing him, they analyzed messages he’d sent, ambiguous words he’d said on the phone, strange things he’d done (like sending a Facebook message to Alona, whom he hadn’t talked to since the end of elementary school, and asking if they’d ever been to a movie together, just the two of them). Someone had seen him on Rothschild Boulevard looking bedraggled, a co-worker reported that he’d been distant from everyone at work even before quitting, a few people remembered thinking he seemed down. He’d written to friends saying that he’d missed all the boats, that it was time for a reckoning. Others remembered cheerful messages, in which he’d reminisced about funny things and asked them to travel to all kinds of places with him. The truth was that until the day Yoel’s sister Rachel phoned Tali, even though Yoel had forbidden her to talk to his friends, and Yonatan and Tali went to see him at his parents’ house, it hadn’t occurred to them that something might really happen to him.
He looked around. The people who’d been at the bar earlier were gone. He opened and shut his eyes, struggling to stay upright, leaned over the bar, propped himself on his hands, ordered another beer and resumed his game. All the summer camps he and Yoel had done since first grade: Ziv community center, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, YMCA, Hebrew University, Ein Karem. Names of kids at elementary school. Five on a Treasure Island, Five Run Away Together, Five Get into a Fix.
Evening must have fallen, though it was impossible to tell from his spot at the bar, where there were no windows. He tracked the bluish light, which seemed to be swallowed up in a faint golden hue that trembled on the armchairs and tables. A young bearded man in a suit sat down next to him. He ordered a tequila and gave Yonatan and his laptop one of those fleeting friendly looks, the kind Yonatan recognized from his other evenings at the bar, which seemed to say: we’re both bored, why don’t we chat or do something interesting? He nodded at the man, looked him over, and wondered if he had any coke; he’d be up for doing a few lines—the man constantly moved his hands, drummed on the bar, stroked his beard—but decided he didn’t and that he was probably also looking for some.
In his first week at the hotel, Yonatan hadn’t talked to anyone except the waiters, but for the past few nights—perhaps because he was tired of the loneliness and afraid it would settle into his soul and something in him would be changed when he went home—he’d started chatting a little at the bar. He kept his distance from men and women like him, who preferred to listen rather than talk, and approached the ones who talked about their work—investment banking, teaching literacy, running an illegal casino in Sonora—and not about their marriages, their parents or their kids, because those topics aroused fears and comparisons in him. If anyone asked what he did, he would say he sold military equipment for a company affiliated with the Israeli Mossad or he was a former soccer player in the Israeli league who now worked as a sports agent, he was a ghostwriter for Klaus Barbie’s daughter (it was precisely his Israeli background that allowed him to understand her; how did you write a character like Klaus Barbie? How did you write at all? You had to put every character’s mask on your own face, and then believe in it).
He looked up. “You almost fell asleep,” said the bearded man in Spanish-accented English. Yonatan whipped his head around: there was no one else in the bar.
“Are you staying at the hotel?” the man asked.
“Yes,” he nodded. He wanted a drink of water and put his hand up for the barman but realized there was no one there.
“They’ve shut down,” the man said with a little smile. “They know you here, so I signed your name, I hope that’s okay.”
Yonatan looked at his computer, annoyed to see something still flickering on the screen, and slammed it shut.
“Will you be able to get back to your room alone?” the man asked, leaning his elbow on the bar and his cheek on his hand. His eyes were red.
Why was he still here, this man? Yonatan wondered suspiciously. Does he want money, drugs, connections? Is he lonely? Is he from a cartel? They kidnap people here, and if you’re lucky they drive you to an ATM and empty your bank account, but if you’re not, like the magazine publisher, they shove you in a cellar. He wanted to leave the bar but had trouble moving, like in those dreams.
“I’ll walk you back,” the man said warmly and took a last sip of his drink.
Yonatan was sweating. He opened his eyes and something blinded him, and he saw tiny objects. He was too foggy and wouldn’t be able to protect himself if this man did something to him. He stood up and started walking away.
“Señor,” he heard the man say behind him. He considered not even turning around, but the motion seemed to precede his resolve. The man was holding his laptop: “You probably need this.” He walked to the reception area and the man followed, his footsteps sounding light, as though he were floating on air. Yonatan struggled to remember the man’s body—was there room for a pistol there? He may never see Itamar and Shira again; he had trouble breathing. He saw the front desk and sped up, and when he got close to the receptionist he felt a sensation of freedom, almost joy. The man stood next to him. “The gentleman has had a little too much to drink. Please help him get to his room, and make sure his computer gets there too,” he said to the young clerk and put the laptop on the counter. “Writers need a computer,” he said, “but some things are too serious to write stories about.”
“That is true, Señor Hernandez,” said the clerk.
“I wish you the best of luck,” Hernandez said to him and walked away. “Don’t be late getting back to your lovely boy.”
“Thank you very much, Señor Hernandez,” he mumbled, struggling to recall if he’d told him anything about Itamar, until he realized: his screensaver was a picture of them together.
“Do you know him?” he asked the clerk.
“Señor Hernandez is a poet,” the clerk whispered. “He’s been coming here every week for ten years to write his magazine column.”
“Which magazine?” Yonatan asked, trying to remember the name on the issues in the publisher’s office. Had he told the poet to talk to Yonatan? Could they have found the young woman with glasses?
“A minor poetry magazine,” the clerk replied, “Señor Hernandez owns it.”
For a moment Yonatan was embarrassed: here he was, another coward with an overactive imagination, like all those westerners Carlos had made fun of. It was just like his and Yoel’s games in the wadi when they’d pinned a conspiracy on anyone who walked by. He tapped his fingers on the counter and smiled at the clerk. The sense of relief was more exciting and crushing than all the anxieties. Warm currents whirled in his body. “You know something,” he told the clerk, “it’s starting to feel like home, this hotel of yours.” He suddenly felt like singing.
——
“Care for a victory lap of your childhood haunts?” Yoel asked when he sat down in the car. Moments before, he’d been standing outside the supermarket, wearing black pants and a blue button-down shirt. He was freshly shaved, and his frizzy hair with its side part was glistening with gel. He put down his black leather bag, took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one and blew smoke at the blue sky. His suntanned face acquired a contemplative expression. He seemed like his relaxed old self, in the elegant clothes he’d taken to wearing since finishing law school and starting his residency at a law firm in Jerusalem, but his head looked outsized, like those butterfly or turtle costumes their summer camp counselors used to wear, as though his outfit needed a different head to complete the picture. It took a few moments for Yonatan to notice that Yoel’s brown wallet was sticking out of his pants pocket and his hems were crumpled. Yoel was sweating, as Yonatan was, and he noticed sweat stains on his blue shirt under the arms and above his stomach; perhaps that was why they didn’t hug or shake hands.
The smell of cigarettes and sweat mingled with a sharper odor in the car, something like old onions. Outside the supermarket, rotting vegetables were strewn about among torn cardboard boxes. “It’s hot in here,” Yoel grumbled and started fiddling with the air conditioning while he prattled about his twenty-sixth birthday and the dinner his roommates in Nachlaot were insisting on. If Tali could come all the way from Haifa, he noted, Yonatan could make the effort to come from Tel Aviv.
“I’ll be there,” Yonatan replied, and did not ask why he’d been hearing for three years that Tali was coming to these birthdays and she never made it.
“I hope you’re not disappointed,” Yoel said with a pout, “but we’re not like your brilliant Tel Avivi singles and intellectuals doing their BA for all eternity and finding everything terribly provincial.” It was a line they both knew, and he recited the words wearily.
“Okay, let’s not get into Jerusalem vs. Tel Aviv again,” Yonatan said, blowing warm air on Yoel’s face. “I’d rather kill myself.”
He put in the first CD he saw on the floor, without even recognizing the name of the band; some British trash he’d picked up in London when he used to frequent cellar concert venues and brag about knowing bands no one else had heard of. Yoel listened to the music and grimaced. A few years ago, after they both got out of the army and were living in Jerusalem, they liked to listen to the political talk shows on the car radio and discuss them. He couldn’t remember when they’d stopped that. At the time, Yoel had always claimed there was one answer to every question: the 2001 Intifada. Until that was over, he insisted, nothing would change.
In the shopping center up the street from the supermarket, there was nothing going on. At Café Neeman, an old man leaned on a filthy table while an umbrella with the chain’s logo rolled around by his feet. The man ambled past shop windows, all bare apart from Play & Learn, which displayed cans of paint and paintbrushes scattered around two paint-stained ladders. Yonatan remembered seeing the same display last time he’d been there, a few years ago—they must be getting ready for something big, he decided, and examined his bitter smile in the rearview mirror. He disliked the way it made his lips look crooked. Pictures from those shop windows at a different time—say, 1985—scroll through his mind: he walks past the hamburger joint, the newsstand, the café. Outside Play & Learn, he spins the rack of musical greeting cards: “To My Favorite Teacher,” “To the Best Mom in the World,” and even, “I Love my Dog.” Unsatisfied, he buys some white paper, sits down in the alcove between the patio and the video rental library, and writes, “I’m sorry, Mom.” He draws a house and black grass. It looks pathetic, so he adds a hat and a flower.
Overcome by exhaustion, he rubbed his heavy eyelids, scalded by the sun blazing through the car windows. Didn’t there use to be more trees here? he wondered. The sky seemed to have shrunk, too: if he stretched his arm up high it would disappear into the clouds.
“Did they change the streets?” he asked Yoel.
“Yeah, it’s no big deal,” Yoel answered languidly, “just turn left.” Yoel was clearly also dejected; Yonatan knew the quick dives his mood could take. It didn’t happen frequently, but when it did he spoke in monosyllables, all the vibrancy drained from his voice. Even when he emitted a purr of laughter, not a single muscle moved, and nothing could cheer him up. And then he would vanish, the way he did when they lived in London after the army, but a day or two later he’d come back, cheerful as ever, showering his charm on everyone.
Yonatan had been postponing this visit to Jerusalem for months, until his father told him there’d been a fire at the storage facility in Givat Shaul. He didn’t know any details and couldn’t even remember which floor their storage unit was on, but Yoel somehow found the information “in five minutes.” Concerned that they might clear out the unit and everything would be lost, his father suggested they go together, but Yonatan didn’t want that. He’d never forgiven him for moving all their stuff into storage, and was even less forgiving of himself for never going there once in recent years, not even to retrieve the photo albums.
He thought back to his first weekend in Tel Aviv. Before that, he went home to Jerusalem every Friday morning and stayed with his father; sometimes Yoel slept over. But after he’d been living in Tel Aviv for almost a year, his father announced that he’d sold the Jerusalem apartment. At first Yonatan wasn’t bothered about clearing out his childhood home, but one evening, when he found himself alone in the Tel Aviv apartment, he realized that he’d never viewed it as his home, and that he’d lived there protected by the knowledge that he had somewhere he could always go back to, a place where his movements followed a familiar rhythm. Perhaps the fact that he went back to his childhood home every weekend, wandered among the rooms, made noise and played music, preserved an ember of the vitality that had once been there.
He’d spent the whole weekend roaming the apartment, disgusted by the shabby rooms, his restlessness protecting him from the onslaught of scenes from family Sabbaths: eating breakfast with his mother, watching Hitchcock films in the living room, his father and Shaul competing over who could name more Oscar-winning films, playing ball on the balcony. It was as if the loss of the family home was the only way for him to acknowledge the end of their history in Jerusalem.
He turned right. Yoel was on a work call, mostly listening with a bored expression and occasionally giving a curt response. “They’re laying people off everywhere right now,” he said before hanging up. “We’re in a crazy recession, my friend, but don’t worry, you’ll beat them all in the end.” He tossed his phone into the glove compartment, slammed it shut, and murmured, “They restate the obvious as obsessively as an old sex addict in Thailand. They twist your soul, these characters, they shove their dreariness down your throat like medicine.”
The car zigzagged down to Givat Shaul, past the gas station where he and Tomer Shoshani had washed windows in the summer of sixth grade. They used to exchange jabs and jokes with the Palestinian shift manager and his fifteen-year-old son, and sometimes they sprayed soapy water at each other. But a week after being hired they got into a fight with the son, and that Friday night they marched over there, smashed the warehouse padlock with a hammer, filched a few cans of engine oil and emptied them out on the field behind the station. When Yonatan’s father took them to work on Sunday morning, the manager asked to talk to him, and the two men walked around the gas pumps together while the manager’s son sat on an empty crate and looked at them. Yonatan breathed in the gasoline smell he’d learned to like. Tomer Shoshani muttered that they didn’t have to confess to anything because no one was going to believe an Arab.
Yonatan’s father came back to the car with a blank expression and did not say a word. They didn’t speak either. After dropping off Tomer Shoshani at home, he turned around to look at Yonatan and said, “I’ve never been as ashamed as I am today.”
“That’s only because you’re clueless,” he snapped back. His whole body was prickling and the hair on his arms stood on end.
A mocking smile came to his father’s lips, but he was not a man to make faces or smirk. A shadow of fragility passed through his green eyes; the skin around them had gone ashen and saggy.
His father got out of the car, and Yonatan watched him walk to the steps with his shoulders hunched and his head bowed, and was afraid he was going to collapse. He got out and followed him, so he could catch him if he fell—ashamed of obeying his fear but unable to do otherwise. He was battered by visions of his father falling, or being beaten by strangers, or crashing his car into a wall. He remembered that, a couple of years earlier, his father had complained of chest pain for a couple of months and slept in the living room on a mattress on a wooden board. Every day after school, Yonatan would pick out a movie at the video library: Death Wish 1, 2 and 3, all four Dirty Harry films, and anything with Chuck Norris, Alain Delon or Jean-Paul Belmondo. They would eat lunch together, which in those days was a hot meal of rice and chicken breast, or schnitzel, and his father would tell him stories about the New York Knicks and characters in old Jerusalem or in Damon Runyon books. Then they’d sit in the living room with their arms around each other and watch a movie. When Yonatan imitated Chuck Norris, kicking and punching at the air, his father taught him how to do an uppercut and a cross punch. Sometimes he’d count how many times Yonatan could dribble a ball, impressed by his talent. Those were hours of happiness, free of castigation and guilt, when his short-tempered father treated him patiently. But when his mother came home from work, their camaraderie evaporated, and his father went back to playing—at times clumsily—the father figure.
To this day, his father sometimes said, “That was a good time, wasn’t it?” And Yonatan would answer, “It was a good time.”
“I didn’t really do anything bad,” he called after his father. A tremor of tenderness ran through him, and he wanted to hug him.
But his father barked, “We’ll talk about it this evening,” and it was clear that he was in a hurry to get to work.
A week later they got into another fight in the car, and his father said he and his mother had discussed sending him to a kibbutz for a while, so that he could acquire some better habits and learn how to function in society. He enumerated all the things Yonatan had started and abandoned: boxing, organ lessons, running team, computer club, chess club, karate class.
“Don’t forget folk dancing, Dad.”
“Be that as it may,” his father said, clearing his throat. He explained that his mother had been feeling unwell, and her blood sedimentation rate was low. They could no longer tolerate the way he tormented her and didn’t help out around the house. It wasn’t just his mother: he’d even been rude to Ratzon from downstairs, and now Ratzon wasn’t talking to him.
When he was little, he used to sleep over at Ratzon’s every Thursday when his parents went to Tel Aviv, and whenever they went overseas. He would wake up early in the morning, jump out of bed, and walk barefoot down the hallway wrapped in a blanket, hoping he wasn’t too late to catch Ratzon putting on tefillin. He usually found Ratzon standing in the living room with the black leather straps bound around his forearm. Ratzon would whisper hello, and Yonatan would also whisper, so as not to disturb the ritual. Sometimes Ratzon agreed to wrap the strap, still warm and sticky from his skin, around Yonatan’s arm. And they would stand together by the window facing the large trees, with the wadi looking like a black swollen hat to their left, and the dark skies above them. Ratzon would hold the prayer book and read from it, and Yonatan would join in for the few lines he’d memorized: And from thy wisdom, O most high God, thou shall reserve for me; and from thy understanding thou shalt give me understanding; and with thy loving-kindness thou shalt do great things for me; and with thy might thou shalt destroy my enemies and my adversaries.
He wanted to apologize to Ratzon, but he kept putting it off. After all, things one has said to another person have already made inroads in their soul, and no apology can pull them out or wipe their traces away. A poisoned piece of consciousness, like burnt earth, can never again be as it was, and Ratzon would never again see his good virtues.
“That’s a good idea,” he said to his father in a matter-of-fact voice. “Why don’t you send me to live on a kibbutz?”
His father replied angrily, “Suddenly you want to live there?” His father had clearly expected him to be frightened by the idea and try to please them by promising to improve his behavior.
He wasn’t sure if he was faking courage or if he was really willing to leave. And perhaps this was the solution that would save everyone. He could no longer tolerate the gloomy mornings; he never got out of bed until his father yanked the covers off, and even if things were not as bad as he perceived them, it didn’t matter: there were days when he woke up anticipating change and making new plays, but by midday he slumped home feeling dejected, and in the evenings he watched TV or disappeared into an adventure book and wished he could forget everything. He realized, for the first time, that perhaps his mother would be happier and stronger if he lived somewhere else. Maybe that light-hearted, secretive smile he saw on her face in old pictures would come back, and they could meet on weekends and have meals together and laugh a lot, like Tali and her parents.
But these weekend scenes soon began to look stupid, clumsily borrowed from other families—any minute now he’d be imagining them riding horses in the desert. Still, if he were somewhere else he could start over, having learned from his Beit HaKerem days. He positioned his alter ego in every different setting he visited—his parents’ friends’ house, a kibbutz they’d stayed at on a school trip—and outfitted him with new customs, friends and hobbies. Sometimes this other version of him, who lived on a kibbutz or in Rehovot or Beersheba, emerged again after being forgotten.
The kibbutz idea soon faded, though, and when he asked about it, his father acted as if they’d never seriously considered it. When he asked again, his mother cut him off and said it would never happen, he wasn’t going anywhere. Her resolve surprised him, as did the warm currents in his limbs. He wondered if in fact he’d been afraid of the idea, and if all the imaginary scenes of a new life were merely part of a plot he’d hatched to outsmart the fear. Had such hopes truly existed?
They parked outside the storage facility and stepped out in the parking lot adjacent to the main road. Trucks roared past, people loaded wooden joists into a shipping container, they heard hammering and drilling, and a yellow crane towered above. The back of Yonatan’s neck burned under the sun and his hands felt hot, probably from the steering wheel that was always sticky in summer. Yoel leaned against a wall next to a man in overalls who was sharpening knives. He did not say a word, but he was obviously impatient.
“Are you in a hurry?” he asked Yoel coolly. All this looked too familiar. At some point in their childhood Yoel’s schedule had become perpetually full, and it took years for Yonatan to understand that Yoel needed an escape route from every event.
“Not at all,” Yoel replied, smoothing out his wrinkled shirt and lighting a cigarette, and they both grimaced. “It’s too hot for this.”
Yonatan watched the sun playing tricks on the warehouse buildings: half the margosa tree was shaded, the other flooded with light that turned its leaves and branches golden, and the tree was reflected in the windows. A strange glimmer bounced off the car bumpers, spraying blinding light everywhere.
When they climbed up the steps, Yoel proceeded to recount cases he’d recently worked on, most of which involved real estate developers being sued for contract breaches. Yonatan already knew these stories from Yoel’s visits to his bachelor pad in Tel Aviv. He would arrive late at night, light a cigarette, strip down and leave his clothes in a pile by the door, pick out a pair of shorts and a T-shirt from Yonatan’s closet, and walk around barefoot, not even slightly embarrassed by his overgrown toenails. He mimicked the witnesses, the prosecutors and the judge, boasted about the droll questions he’d prepared for the senior attorney to “demolish the plaintiff,” and denigrated his own law firm.
The stories were always fascinating, but Yoel’s take on his own deeds never changed: he was the young Jerusalemite who had to serve the rich barons with a disgust posing as delight or a delight posing as disgust, depending on whom he was talking to and what sort of mood he was in. The only thing that did change was Yoel’s loathing of his colleagues. He mocked the interns’ rat-like ambition and the way they worshipped the partners—in contrast to his own self-professed “perfect flattery arising from perfect contempt.” Mostly, he mocked the partners, with their bald heads and potbellies, their tedious political pronouncements after yet another terrorist attack, analyzing the failure of the Camp David peace talks or the Second Intifada, which they said “screwed up wonderful initiatives like the ‘Gaza Riviera.’” He mocked their lifestyle, their vapid existence, but it also somehow aroused panic in him, and he described it obsessively, in great detail, searching for evidence of something similar in his and Yonatan’s lives. At times he seemed to believe that no matter what they did, they would end up drifting to the same place, to that “faded old man in diapers” whom he mentioned often. His face would turn ashen and he would sit on the couch rubbing his hands together, staring into space or repeatedly insisting that he should have quit his job, he hadn’t made a single good decision since high school, he’d missed opportunities and done nothing that really interested him, nothing that was “part of the body, like you and your writing.” Sometimes he asked Yonatan, only half-jokingly, why he hadn’t pressured him to make the right decisions. But then he would snap out of his state of dread and screech with laughter.
Yoel mocked the partners in his firm and joked about them (“I just want to shake that rat-faced loser and scream at him: ‘You’re a flaccid, bald, rich old man—how can you sit here every day just to make a buck off some hardworking people? Go to India! Go to Lapland! Live a little!’”). But Yonatan knew that Yoel’s professed loathing was complicated, and that any time he admitted to hating someone, he risked exposing the stitches in the bright robe he wore when he went out into the world and charmed all the people who thronged after him and competed for his attention. In fact the only people he consistently talked about with avid hatred were their old enemies from the Beit HaKerem days.
“The master of empty gestures,” Yonatan sometimes teased Yoel, claiming he showered affection on everyone because he didn’t genuinely love or hate anyone, and that no one really made a dent in him. Yoel used to quote these observations admiringly, and said it was all slander: he might wear a mask with most people, certainly in a professional setting, but he also had a genuine face for the people he liked. “I’m a cheerful, affectionate person who doesn’t walk around the world feeling disgruntled and spraying venom, like the artist and intellectual types you hang out with!” he said with a wink. Yoel found these characters so amusing that sometimes, when he was bored, he would tell Yonatan, “Go on, call up one of your pale-faced weirdo friends from the literature department and ask him over to talk about Lacan and the occupation.”
As they got closer to the warehouse, Yonatan became more disgusted by his damp shirt, his clingy hair, and the acrid smell of cigarettes on his breath. They stopped at the sliding door and pushed it open together, mocking each other’s weak muscles, and Yoel started reminiscing about a joke they’d played on their science teacher.
“Forget about that now,” Yonatan interrupted.
The storage unit was dark apart from a few triangles of light dancing on the walls. He couldn’t see anything. Maybe everything really did burn, he thought. A few strips of light clung to the old orange-yellow lampshade from their living room, which seemed to emerge from the shadows. He turned around and shut the door. They were left in total darkness, and he felt relieved. He found the light switch, and before flipping it his muscles tensed. Yoel asked: “Did you find it?” and he said, “Yes,” and struggled to steady his breath, still not flipping the switch. Yoel did not say a word to rush him.
He switched the light on. Bright light from a dusty bulb painted the wall, and he caught sight of smeared blood, squashed mosquitos and flies. He turned when he heard Yoel’s yelp of surprise, and found himself looking at their old living room, arranged exactly as it used to be on HaGuy Street. It was as if someone had replicated it here. The orange three-seat sofa was alongside the wall, the smaller couch was near it, and in the gap between them and the wall stood the grooved black table. On it was the lamp that filtered the light in a way he always liked, and in front of that was the square glass-top table, its chrome legs marred by white scratches. On the floor was the rug in shades of black, gray and purple, though it looked smaller than he remembered, and next to the big window looking out on the street was the rocking chair. Beside it was the two-tiered black lacquered wooden cart—its wheels were painted red because his mother had decided one day that the living room needed brightening up—and on it a vase they always kept pens and coins in. Opposite the large sofa were the black dressers, and to its left the white porcelain bowl, but without the gold-rimmed spoon it used to hold, and a few silver knives and forks scattered next to it. He remembered there being more of those.
A thick layer of dust coated the furniture, and cobwebs stretched between the ceiling and the small couch. There was a dank smell in the room, as there was in his building’s basement. Scanning the layout, he began to notice that some things were missing, broken, scratched, spaced too far apart. He couldn’t understand why he was doing it, but he couldn’t stop.
Yoel leaned on the wall and rubbed his cheeks, while Yonatan ducked under the cobwebs and sat down on the large sofa. His body sank into it and he became aware of every single limb, as though he were examining how each of them clung to the sofa. Threads of gray dust hovered in the light, cohering into ships, arrows, ladders. He brushed them away, coughed, wiped his dusty hands on his pants before he remembered that they were filthy too, leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He remembered the weeks he’d spent sleeping on this sofa, after Lior left him and he wouldn’t go near the bed in his room, where they’d slept together and where every indentation marked a trace of her body. Yoel came over and sat down next to him so gingerly that he wasn’t willing to swear he’d actually put his bottom on the sofa.
Yonatan put his feet up on the glass-top table. After some hesitation, Yoel did too. He lit a cigarette and passed it to Yonatan, who inhaled and flicked ash on the table, while Yoel emptied out his cigarette box to use as an ashtray. Yonatan couldn’t help laughing at Yoel’s insistence on hygiene. As if it really made any difference now.
The mimetic pretense of the setup annoyed him—how could anyone have thought it would do any good? Even if they’d burned all the furniture to a cinder, it wouldn’t have made any difference. He grabbed the cigarette from Yoel, who resisted, perhaps guessing at Yonatan’s intention, and sparks fell on the sofa between them. He flicked the cigarette onto the middle of the rug and they sat there for a few minutes, waiting for something to happen.
He got up and walked over to the chest of drawers from his room, past a pile of labeled cardboard boxes: pots, books, pictures, jewelry, miscellaneous. Instead of clothes, the drawers contained bills, envelopes, and thin blue sheets of paper covered with his mother’s large handwriting: “My dears, I know I’ve been lazy about writing letters recently, but I believe it’s a condition that not only applies to writing, but invades everyday life too. And that is unlike me…” Next to her signature she’d added, in a different colored ink: “July 10, 1971.” There were also his mother’s military discharge papers, and folded inside them, a death notice clipped from the newspaper, with condolences to his mother from the Minister and Ministry of Communications, for the death of her mother (“May you be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem”). There were driver’s licenses, a musical mug he’d bought her, prescriptions for medication, and the blue cassette tape Shaul had sent him for Hila’s dance party at the end of sixth grade.
Digging through the items, he found a few black-and-white photos bundled together with a rubber band, in the largest of which his mother stood before a dark wall or a black screen dotted with butterflies of light. She wore a tight gray dress that accentuated her breasts, with a white lace collar, a gold bracelet on her wrist and a cigarette between her fingers. Her right leg was folded behind her, with her foot on the screen. Her curls, longer than they were in the other pictures, fell over her forehead, and in her black eyes, gazing slightly upward, there was a dreamy expression he did not recognize. He was amazed by her natural expression. There was no doubt in his heart that this was the Epstein & Feldheim photograph, and he wished they’d seen it together when she was alive. He recalled that when he’d asked her about the picture, she’d poked fun at his big brother’s overactive imagination, but now he wondered if that exchange had really happened. Tiny specks of mist separated the memory from ones he was more certain about. He had already found that sometimes, hiding between the memories, were events that had never happened, little apparitions that had first emerged in childhood and continued to permeate his mind, camouflaged as memories.
He held the picture, debating whether or not to put it back, and was revisited by a notion he’d seldom thought of lately, perhaps because it frightened him: when she used to talk about the things they’d missed out on, his mother was not only grieving those childhood years when he’d loved her so deeply, but lamenting the fact that he hadn’t known her in the years before he was born. By the time he was growing up, her strength had waned and she was disillusioned, and the persona he remembered, the one who was present in his home, captured only a small part of her and committed an injustice to the woman she really was. He remembered Yaara’s stories about his mother sitting in their home drinking wine and entertaining them, and he reconstructed Yaara’s sardonic expression, which seemed to be implying that he did not understand his mother at all.
He shut the drawers, sat back down on the sofa and held the photograph against his thigh.
“I still remember every minute of that morning, after you called,” Yoel said.
“I called you? When?”
“At four a.m.”
“I don’t remember that,” he murmured, surprised by Yoel’s boldness. “You’ve said so many things over the years.”
Yoel sat silently looking at his shoes, then said in a subdued voice: “Maybe those are the things I wanted to see.”
For a moment he hoped Yoel might tell him again how much his mother had loved him and how close they actually were. He had the illusion that, if he said those things, then not everything was signed and sealed, and there was still a chance that Yoel was seeing something he himself could not. But Yoel said nothing, and he knew that it was because Yoel had read things he’d written. Yonatan sat up straight. “Let’s get out of here.”
“But we haven’t found the photo albums,” Yoel said.
“We’ll come another time.”
“I can keep them at my house,” Yoel suggested, answering a question that had not been asked. He did not say what was obvious to them both: they were never coming back.
“I don’t need them now,” he told Yoel, sounding almost pleading.
“I’ll keep them at my house,” Yoel insisted. “Go out for some fresh air.”
He had trouble disconnecting from the touch of the sofa, but eventually he stood up and walked away. He hurried down the corridor, holding the photograph close to his body, being careful not to get it dirty. He skipped down the steps and glanced at his reflection in a mirror: he was dusty gray, and his neck looked grimy where the sweat had mingled with dust. The sight of his thick gray eyebrows amused him. He stepped away from the mirror and dashed outside into a blazing sphere of light under a sky blotted with a grayish-yellow hue. Unable to stop his momentum, he marched to the car, sat down in the driver’s seat, put the photo in the glove compartment, wiped the sweat off his face, gripped the burning hot wheel with both hands and drove away.