He dreamed that his father died. People said the funeral was going ahead despite the rain, and asked if there would be a shelter set up—a lot of people would be coming to pay their respects to his father, after all. But when he arrived at his father’s house he found him sitting in the living room, coughing and convulsing, his face white. Every time he peeked into the living room his father was still there, and the color slowly returned to his face and he stopped coughing and sat watching a tennis match on TV. He called Yonatan over to sit with him, and he looked worried. Yonatan ran his hand over his father’s arm and felt elated: “It’s a great day!” he exclaimed. He’d always been pleased when good things happened, but this kind of wild exuberance only came when a disaster he’d predicted did not materialize. But his exhilaration was cut short when he noticed his father’s friends sitting on white plastic chairs, set out around the room for the shiva, and they all looked despondent.
“How will we explain this to people?” one friend said, touching mustard-colored scars on his forehead.
“People’s hearts are breaking, people ran bereavement notices, people wrote remembrances on Facebook,” said a redheaded man.
“And now we’re supposed to say: sorry, the deceased is watching the French Open,” another giggled.
Yonatan thought how odd it was that these people, who had always treated his father respectfully, sometimes excessively so, were now discussing him as if he were not there.
You can’t turn back the wheel, they decided. His father was dead: arrangements had been made, a funeral announced, eulogizers chosen, and now the events in this house had to keep pace. Otherwise, when his father really did die, people would not look upon it kindly, they’d hold a grudge, and he’d pass from the world unnoticed. You can’t die twice. “In the good old days, you could still die…” someone commented.
His father sprawled on the couch, head leaning back, staring at a reflection of the tennis match on the ceiling. The yellow ball bounced back and forth between his eyes.
Then Yonatan was on a busy street, and he knew his father was going to kill himself so that he’d be dead in time for the funeral. He rushed over, ignoring passersby who consoled him, and reached a similar but not identical house. Its windows were broken and there was a freezing gale swirling around it. There were crows perched on the landscape paintings that hung in the living room, the way they used to sit on the tree outside Yoel’s bedroom window. He knew he had to find his father before it was too late, and he saw his father’s friends sitting around the balcony table drinking vodka.
“Show us a picture of your lovely pregnant wife!” one of them called. “Your first kid—that’s no joke!” They all raised their glasses and toasted his late father. When he yelled that his father wasn’t dead, they looked at him sympathetically. Their eyes sparked as they started to rhyme at him: You’re not a boy, soon you’ll have a boy, no one here is a boy. They told him to act like a man in his mid-thirties: Alexander the Great had conquered the world and had time to die by his age.
He grabbed the vodka bottle, smashed its neck on the table, and blood dripped from his hand onto his shoes. Everyone scattered. “Where is he?” he yelled, but no one answered. He went up to the redhead and brandished the broken glass against his neck, and he realized he was going to have to do it, though he was sickened by the thought of cutting through the folds in that freckled skin; he remembered that the redhead man had always stood next to him at memorials, and had bought copies of his books for everyone he knew. The redhead pointed, and Yonatan skipped down the steps and pushed open a heavy metal door that looked like the basement door in their old building. Inside, he found his father lying on an old mattress. His entire body, from head to toe, was wrapped in layers of cling film the way a fragile gift might be wrapped. His body was still.
He stood staring, unable to move, but after a while he saw his father’s hands shift under the plastic wrap. His father rolled his eyes and a pallor spread over his face, and Yonatan screamed and cursed at him and started tearing off the plastic, but it was too tightly wrapped, so he picked up the broken bottle and slashed at the layers. He fell back, out of breath, and wiped the sweat from his face with his bleeding hand. His father sat up, shreds of bloodied plastic clinging to his face, glared at him furiously and said, “Enough! Are you out of your mind? The fifth set is starting soon.”
He put his back against the thin mattress. His body felt ossified by the cold room. His throat burned: he obviously had a cold. He pulled the thin wool blanket up over his body. He spotted a strip of sky hidden behind the curtains, which had begun flapping, their hems lapping at the damp logs in the fireplace. Fragmentary scenes from his father’s living room moved farther away from the well-lit station of his dream. Desperately trying to snatch several dream trails, he chased too many and most of them combusted right before his eyes. He wondered whether he’d been thrown into another dream, but he sensed a presence behind him. Rolling onto his side, he saw a silhouette sitting on his bed. He rubbed his eyes hard, closed and opened them, until he recognized Yoel, with a lit cigarette between his fingers, staring straight at him.
How long had he been sitting here? he wondered with horror. Yoel did not take his eyes off him, just sat holding the now-extinguished cigarette as if he hadn’t noticed that Yonatan was awake. He must not have been looking at Yonatan at all.
He buried his face in the pillow, feeling weak. He was thirsty again. He often woke up at night with a dreadful thirst, and he’d begun keeping a water bottle next to his bed. The doctor said he had to understand that he wasn’t a young man anymore, his body had different needs, and besides, the stress ahead of the birth of his first child might be having an effect.
He replayed their day: he and Yoel had driven through western Ireland to County Clare, in a rented black BMW, listening to the same songs over and over again. The roads were narrow and winding, and the landscape—little villages, smoking chimneys, wooden fences, grassy meadows, sheep and cows—had a monotonous, replicating beauty. They marveled at something one moment, and the next moment saw its slightly less or slightly more beautiful double.
They started driving at 6 a.m. and did not stop even once, and for the first time since Shira had reached the thirtieth week of her pregnancy, he didn’t call or text twice a day to ask how she was feeling. If their momentum were to slow and the music to go quiet, it seemed, the masks he and Yoel wore, which enabled them to take this trip and pose as the friends they used to be—would fall away. In the afternoon it became overcast, but a channel of blue sky still shone bright along the road they were on, which lifted Yonatan’s spirits. “Look at the channel—isn’t it strange?” he said, and Yoel murmured, “Yes, but it’s closing up, can’t you see?”
He couldn’t. He stared at Yoel’s hands on the wheel, marred by two deep, dry wounds, purplish gashes with a white coating. As they drove on, the gray clouds floated toward the channel, the light became murkier, the trees and wooden houses became so washed-out that one could not swear they were there. Finally the clouds swallowed up the channel of blue sky, and for the first time that day, juicy drops of rain fell like little leaves, the road was flooded with puddles, and they couldn’t see a thing through the windshield. But Yoel did not slow down, enjoying the jets sprayed by the wheels, and drove recklessly through craters full of water.
He insisted on taking over the wheel: Shira would never forgive him, he told Yoel, if he died before their first child was born.
“They, too, shall learn to forgive,” Yoel replied dismissively. There were creases of a smile on his forehead, below his receding hairline. Yoel said the visibility was low and they wouldn’t be able to see the cliffs overlooking the sea, and Yonatan said there was no way to tell: it might brighten up. Yoel had always dreamed of seeing those cliffs, since back when he and Michael had planned to conduct some sort of Uranium Club ritual on them. When he and Yonatan had lived in London after the army, they’d planned to take the train to Ireland but something had come up, he couldn’t remember what, and Yoel had gone back to Israel; maybe he’d invented a job offer or a lover.
The whole London episode was a failure they both acknowledged, and perhaps that was why they hadn’t traveled together for so long. They’d dropped out of the English course at Paddington a minute before the millennium celebrations; hung around SoHo for nights on end, after playing blackjack at a casino and betting on the horses; and bought fake ecstasy twice. Most of the time, though, they were lonely and didn’t meet anyone new. Even when Yaara’s sister Avigail happened to be in town and slept over in their flat for a few days, things did not improve. They prattled about sex and got drunk every night, but nothing interesting happened.
Yonatan had hardly seen the sisters since his mother’s death. In fact, all his parents’ friends and their kids had disappeared from his life within two years of his mother dying. At first they still asked him and his father over sometimes, but it always felt forced. For some time after he joined the army, he kept coming to these meetings for his father’s sake, until he realized his father was also unenthusiastic—and that perhaps he was doing it for Yonatan, so as not to interrupt the continuity of life. But it was his mother who had nurtured all those relationships, and it was her whom the friends had loved. After a while their meetings dwindled down to once a year: when they visited her grave for the memorial service.
At some point in their late twenties, Yonatan began to understand that Yoel didn’t really know how to read people. He didn’t pick up on hidden cues, perhaps because, contrary to what he professed and in fact believed, people did not really interest him. He knew how to probe their intentions and motives, he showed an interest in their stories and enjoyed the way human and political games were played out, but he was not capable of imagining—to the extent that anyone can—the way someone else might see the world, and he did not have the capacity to commiserate with them. This was the deceptive space in Yoel, and even Yonatan, who supposedly knew him better than anyone else, had taken years to decipher it and still doubted his own conclusions, especially since Yoel’s charm was so crushing and he was so generous and affectionate, lacking any pettiness or jealousy.
Had he asked any of their acquaintances, most would have answered that they found Yoel easier to talk to than him. But Yoel packed whatever people told him into a tyrannical machine that embodied his worldview. If he met a married woman who was raising two kids and claimed to be satisfied with her life, he would describe her boring weekends with the annoying in-laws in the suburbs and point out how lucky he was to have free and flexible relationships instead of being trapped in that kind of marriage, because he did not really see her as a whole human being who was not merely designed to reflect his own choices.
Only rarely did he conclude that he’d wronged someone. After he went back to live with his parents in Beit HaKerem, he kept asking Yonatan if he’d felt supported by Yoel after his mother’s death. Yonatan answered begrudgingly that those days were hazy in his mind, but that in every flash of memory he saw Tali and Lior and Yoel, which must mean that yes, Yoel had stood by him. Still, Yoel expressed remorse, intimating an intense dislike of the person he used to be. But his interest in that era wasn’t really related to Yonatan’s mother’s death, but to the reckoning he claimed he was conducting.
Yoel lit another cigarette, and even though the thick smoke in the car was already making Yonatan nauseous, he did not complain. The sky grew even darker and no cliffs were visible on the horizon, which in any case was veiled behind dark clouds. Yonatan said it was time to stop for an early dinner, and Yoel nodded, but every time they approached a restaurant or a pub, Yoel went into great detail about how pathetic it was and wearily suggested driving on to find somewhere better. They were both hungry and Yonatan lost his patience: Yoel’s tirades were exhausting and he felt as if they were driving around in circles.
They finally sat down in an ugly, drafty pub where they were served dried-out roast beef. They didn’t touch the food. They walked out and stood under a shelter with balloons tied to it, and drank beer and smoked cigarettes until they felt nauseous. Just as they were about to leave, a red Range Rover pulled up and a group of kids in shiny jackets tumbled out. They coalesced into a bundle and made their way into the pub, constantly touching each other, pinching and hugging, mussing each other’s hair, laughing. The air felt close and steamy as Yonatan and Yoel watched the kids. When they were gone, they crushed out their cigarettes and walked to the car.
They drove on in silence until it was time to find somewhere to spend the night near the cliffs, which they imagined they would catch sight of on the horizon, swaddled in thick gray clouds. But Yoel rejected every hotel they passed: one was a miserable barn run by drunk Irishmen, the other was as poorly lit as a kibbutz lodge, yet another reminded him of the army where he’d done his basic training. There was no reason to compromise, he insisted: they weren’t in a hurry. Yonatan was tired, but he reminded himself that the purpose of this trip was to reinstate Yoel in the world he’d known before he quit his job and cut off ties with his friends and lay in bed in his Tel Aviv apartment until his mother, who went every day from Jerusalem to spend the night with him, convinced him to move back to Beit HaKerem.
When Yonatan was no longer able to restrain his anger, he remarked that all the places looked the same, they were all crappy little hotels. Yoel, as if he hadn’t heard him, enumerated the drawbacks of yet another hotel they were approaching: the rooms were probably freezing and full of spiders, there was no hot water, it was like some impoverished Russian nobleman’s dacha. His diatribes showed the occasional glimmer of his old volubility. Yonatan usually delighted in Yoel’s rants, but he couldn’t help feeling that Yoel was caught in an insatiable, feverish whirlwind, and that his seemingly coherent words were simply being tossed into the world like a net, catching whatever they may. Perhaps it was his own fault: he’d danced around Yoel all day, enticing him to talk the way he used to, and he’d got what he asked for, only to find that it made everything worse.
The brakes screeched as he pulled up outside a cluster of huts connected by gravel paths with droopy weeds on either side. Unlike everyone else who’d been with Yoel since he moved back home, Yonatan felt he had to resist Yoel’s capricious desires and impose some limitations. In fact, this might be what everyone was expecting of him: to finally put an end to it all. “This is where we’re staying,” he declared.
“Look how pathetic those bored farmers are, with their fat red cheeks,” Yoel said. “Even the darkness doesn’t want to come down here. Let’s just go to the next hotel.”
“There’s nowhere else out there, calm down!” Yonatan shouted.
“But you don’t always have to give up, we can find somewhere better,” Yoel shot back.
“How do you know?”
“It’s obvious. You don’t always have to compromise.”
Now Yonatan was really angry, because he suspected that Yoel’s last words were directed at something much larger. “We’re sleeping in this fucking hotel,” he spat, and got out of the car and slammed the door.
He sat up in bed and leaned against the wooden beams. Cool air flowed in between them and chilled the back of his neck. Even though he tried not to look at Yoel, he kept seeing him out of the corner of his eye, and he could not tolerate the thought of Yoel staring at him in the dark.
“Turn the light on,” he said.
“I can’t, the power’s out,” Yoel said.
He waited for the gloating, now that Yoel’s opinion of the hotel had been confirmed, but there was none.
“How long have you been up?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you even sleep at all?”
“I haven’t slept in ages,” Yoel said, and his voice sounded alien. He seemed annoyed by Yonatan’s feigned ignorance. Yoel’s mother had told him that sometimes Yoel lay in bed in the dark, from morning till evening, for seven or nine hours, staring at the ceiling. She asked Yonatan what her son was seeing up there, and the question had haunted him. He heard it rustle in the music he listened to, and in the wind’s whispers, and blowing through words people said to him. Sometimes it simply screamed in his mind, especially on nights when he lay next to Shira and panicked that he himself was looking at the ceiling too much, and that, by asking the question, Yoel’s mother had activated a virus that had always been in both of them, waiting to be set free.
A tremor crawled through his legs and up to his groin, and he struggled to describe the sensation: perhaps fear. Not of Yoel, of course, but perhaps of the burden he’d taken on. He regretted suggesting this trip. Yoel hadn’t wanted to go anyway, he couldn’t care less about the cliffs. (“Wa’aish ana wa’ihom,” he’d said with a laugh, and Yonatan had been surprised that Yoel remembered the Arabic line he’d given a character in his first book: “Doesn’t matter where we go, my head is always in the same place.”) But Yoel’s family had seized on the idea, and Tali had also joined the lobbying effort. Even Shira had said that if he wanted to go to Ireland to save Yoel, this was his chance, before their baby was born and everything changed. The plan took on outsized proportions, as if people close to Yoel were already dividing time into ‘before the trip’ and ‘after the trip’. Yonatan found the level of anticipation alarming, and secretly hoped Yoel would stick to his refusal. Whenever the two of them were alone, he mentioned other places they could go to, perhaps as a way to dissolve the whole notion: India, Brazil, the Virgin Islands—it was a big world out there.
A few weeks went by, and he invited Yoel to visit them in Tel Aviv on Purim. To his astonishment, Yoel turned up at their apartment wearing gray pressed trousers and a light blue button-down shirt, one of many identical ones which hung in his closet, or so his friends liked to tease him. He’d shaved, and his smooth face gave him a youthful look even though it had filled out. He’d combed his gray curls, replicating his old hairdo from law school days. He had a potbelly, probably because of the pills he took but never talked about. But he was obviously pleased with the way he looked, and when Shira complimented him, he impersonated a 1980s news anchor and exclaimed: “Still in the game! Don’t claim I’m not, good people!” Then he let Shira make him up as a vampire from Buffy, which they used to watch in high school, and they went to a party: two vampires and one Cordelia.
At the party, Yoel stood with his back against the wall. He wore a blank expression. When someone he knew asked where he’d disappeared, or what he thought about the latest political developments, he smiled warmly—a faded replica of his old grin, which vanished as soon as the acquaintance walked away after waiting in vain for Yoel to entertain him or take an interest in him. Most of the time, Yoel and Yonatan stood by the wall without talking, as if nothing required comment, and sometimes they watched Shira dance with her friends. Determined to salvage the evening, Yonatan insisted that he and Yoel go back to his place, where he poured them some whiskey and snorted a few lines of coke left over from his birthday.
Yoel watched him. “Will it help if I do a line?” he asked.
“You’re not supposed to.”
“I know I’m not,” Yoel grunted. He rolled up a bill and snorted one line. “I can’t believe I waited till I was a wreck to do coke for the first time ever. What an ass.”
Yonatan’s mood was improving, and he put on some songs they liked, and shouted out the lyrics. Yoel soon joined in and they drank almost the whole bottle and chain-smoked on the balcony—they were no longer allowed to smoke in the apartment—and when Shira came home they teased her for not being able to drink because of the pregnancy. Yonatan had never asked about that, and they had an unspoken agreement not to discuss it in his presence. They were both sweating and had taken off their shirts and were waving them around, singing. At 1 a.m. a neighbor knocked on the door to complain.
When he made the couch for Yoel to sleep on, Yoel said, “So, should we go? What do you say?”
“Of course we’re going!” Yonatan replied. They hugged, and Yoel’s skin felt warm.
“Let’s get dressed and head to the cliffs. It’s an hour’s drive, right?” He tried to give his voice a note of positivity, even anticipation.
“I don’t know, look at the map.” Yoel’s response had a crudeness that surprised him, because Yoel was one of the politest people he knew. Even after he moved back home, when he had visitors he didn’t want to see, he still treated them kindly.
“Let’s go, we’ll figure it out,” Yonatan said, “we can skip the breakfast at this place.”
Yoel didn’t laugh. “It’s too early to leave,” he said, seeming to take pleasure in Yonatan’s distress.
Yonatan looked at the sky behind the curtains and prayed dawn was rising.
“It’s four-thirty in the morning,” Yoel whispered.
Yonatan felt suddenly bleak, and had no idea how they would spend the remaining hours until morning. He was about to suggest they go back to sleep, but realized how stupid and even cruel that would sound. They couldn’t kill time in the shower because the water was freezing. Yoel was right: this hotel was a nightmare, and there was nowhere to go. As he contemplated a series of ways to get out of the room, something dawned on him. It was a fear they shared: that they would be trapped, with nowhere to escape to, and no amount of creative maneuvering would save them. In the past few years he’d come to understand that Yoel feared this more than he did, that he never set a clear course because he always coveted another space with another escape route—possibilities he found more alluring than his own life, in which everything seemed replaceable. Yoel naively believed that he could live his life without ever committing to anything, and that those close to him, even girlfriends, would accept it because otherwise they would lose him, and he knew that they did not want to lose him.
“Are you writing anything now?” Yoel asked.
“More or less, it’s not entirely clear yet.” That was the answer he gave people he didn’t want to reveal anything to, mostly writerly types who were not on his side.
“Are there going to be things from our world in it? Good stuff, I hope.”
“There’s always a little, right? You know better than I do.”
“It’ll be the last book before you’re a dad, and then you’ll start writing about being tired and having quickies with the nanny,” Yoel scoffed.
“Sounds pretty good,” he replied.
“This thing where you have that world to live in,” Yoel said, lighting a cigarette, “you said you’d go crazy without it?”
It wasn’t really a question. “You know that’s what I feel.”
“Turning a demon into a story, you say. So you really believe in it, in that world, when you’re writing?”
“Its totality draws me in, that’s the thing, so it doesn’t matter if I believe or not.”
“So write about me after I die, and then I won’t be completely dead for you.”
“You’re not going to die!” He moved closer to Yoel to add a sternness to his words. “Don’t even bullshit about that.”
“Maybe not.” Yoel giggled dryly and spat into the ashtray. “We’re just blabbering.”
“Don’t even blabber about it,” he said. “Don’t ever talk about it.”
“But I really crashed, eh? So hard.”
“You’ll be back, that’s obvious.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Yoel muttered, “what a drip you’ve turned into. Write about the tower kids, then. You only mentioned them a little.”
“You’re right, it wasn’t enough. Those fuckers.”
“Maybe they weren’t that bad. We sucked them into our world, for the totality.” Yoel sounded somewhat scornful.
“They did plenty to you in the wadi.”
“Maybe they didn’t do that much really.”
“It was a lot.”
“Never mind,” Yoel said dismissively. “Actually, that was always what you liked to do. Writing, you say. Remember how when I was doing my clerkship you used to make fun of me for being an old man, with all those button-down shirts and the briefcase and the black shoes?”
“You didn’t have to dress like an asshole lawyer,” Yonatan teased.
“That’s true. I was trying too hard. But you didn’t do that. I used to look at you sometimes in the evenings and I couldn’t figure out where you’d actually been all day. I was impressed.”
“Only because you didn’t understand.” Yonatan knew that in their twenties Yoel had idealized his life, perceiving it as lawless and unscheduled, free of unfulfilled passions and capricious bosses. Mostly, Yoel had aggrandized the act of writing, transporting one’s demons, dreams and memories to a different world.
“Sometimes it just wears you down,” Yonatan said. “You start a book with a lot of hopes and ideas, but then it all narrows down and you only deliver on a few of them, and halfway through the book it stops being interesting and you get tempted by a million more exciting ideas, but you have to finish it. Maybe it’s like a regular job.”
“So in the end we were both a parody of grown-ups, you’re saying,” Yoel summed up.
“Were?”
“Yes. Were.”
Neither of them said anything. Yonatan looked out the window, but not even a strip of dawn was visible. He got off the bed, walked to the bathroom in the dark, and splashed cold water on his face until he lost the feeling in his fingers. He was in a better mood and his body felt supple again. “We’re getting out of here,” he announced.
“Now?”
“Yes, right now.” He used the flashlight on his phone to find the clothes strewn on the floor, packed both their bags and dragged them to the door. “Wash your face and let’s get the hell out. We’ll get to the cliffs by morning.” He turned his back on Yoel and stood next to the bags, facing the door as if to clarify that there was no point discussing it any further. He was pleased when he heard Yoel’s footsteps on the wooden floor, though he didn’t hear the water running.
The cold air buffeted them as they trudged through the mud. He bowed his head to protect his face from the wind, but Yoel faced it brazenly, and held out his hand when they got to the car. Yonatan unwillingly handed him the car keys. They sat down on the leather seats and the engine thundered to a start. “Wake up, fat farmers!” Yoel cheered, and fiddled with the heating vents. Yonatan pushed his hand away and aimed the vents at himself, and they slapped each other’s hands and he put his arm around Yoel’s neck and strangled him, and Yoel laughed and pinched his stomach. The car started to warm up, and he felt as if his whole body was being caressed. With a cry of joy they remembered the two little whiskey bottles they’d left in the glove compartment. They drank and lit cigarettes and purred with pleasure, and Yoel turned on the radio and sped out of the parking lot.
“Do you know the way?” Yonatan asked.
“Pretty much. Fasten your seatbelt, it’s dangerous here at night,” Yoel whispered.
The sky was still dark, but on their left two clouds slumped over the hills, strewn with gray spots of dawn. The headlamps lit up the narrow road and he saw no cars, people, animals or houses, as if it were just the two of them left in all of County Clare. Something disquieting began to form inside him. Yoel, unbothered, put a CD in the player. It took him a few notes to recognize the song. “Where did you come up with that one?” he asked Yoel.
“Don’t you like it?” Yoel asked.
“You know Dire Straits suck.”
“So you’re not a fan of ‘Romeo and Juliet?’”
“I already told you, not really.”
“Because I remember a young man, or rather a slightly chubby adolescent, let’s say a high school senior, who listened to this song all the time!”
“I never listened to it even once. Maybe it was that fucking American neighbor,” he said.
“Oh, the tormented teenager listened to it constantly,” Yoel waxed poetic, “and so loudly that Tali and I learned all the words by heart from my room across the street.”
“I never listened to it that much!” he argued, trying to stifle his laughter. It touched him that Yoel had burned the song and carefully laid the trap, waiting for the right moment. It was the kind of trick they used to play on each other.
Yoel pressed down on the gas pedal and took his hands off the wheel. “Admit that you listened to it constantly.”
“When exactly?”
“Senior year, after Lior dumped you.”
“I didn’t.”
“Like hell you didn’t.”
“I didn’t listen to it!” he shouted. “Put your hands back!”
Yoel kept his hands in the air, and Yonatan realized this was not a game anymore. He reached for the wheel but pulled back at the last minute, fearing it would anger Yoel and he’d lose control of the car. Ominously dark clouds veiled the horizon. There’d been signs of dawn—or perhaps he’d just imagined them—but darkness now prevailed again. Was that possible?
“Admit that you listened to it?”
He heard Yoel’s voice dimly, and then something screeched. Yonatan realized he had to say yes but he couldn’t do it: not because of the song, or even because he’d always played the role of the reckless one who was the last to surrender. Perhaps he wanted to test Yoel, to bring everything to a head, to find out if he could still predict the behavior of this man sitting next to him.
The car veered sluggishly to the right, and he wondered if the wheels were misaligned or the road was crooked. He had trouble being fully present in the severity of the moment.
“Admit it,” Yoel said in a raspy voice. Despite the car swerving, his hands were still off the wheel.
Yonatan hoped he’d heard a trace of fear. He watched the car slide onto a dirt path leading into a field. He’d seen large green shapes there before, trees or bushes, and he prayed the field wasn’t fenced. Then he had an image of Shira lying awake in their bed. “I admit it!” he yelled.
Yoel let out a deep breath, grabbed the wheel and swung it wildly, but the car was already rolling down a dirt slope and he couldn’t get it back onto the road. Yonatan heard muffled crunches, as if the undercarriage was grating against branches or bushes. “Stop!” he shouted and put his hand on the wheel in between Yoel’s.
Yoel braked, the car rocked and bounced over a few stones, its nose dipped forward, and then they stopped with a thud. He remembered the muddy sheep they’d seen yesterday and the sheepdogs circling them, and imagined in the dark that he could see the yellow sparkling eyes of foxes. He hoped there was no creature bleeding under the car, because then he would do something to Yoel, he wouldn’t be able to hold back.
He put both his hands on his sweaty chest and heard rhythmic panting, like he did when he ran, but he wasn’t sure if it was coming from Yoel or from his own body. There was a cough or a burst of laughter, and he smelled grass and shit and sweat, and through the window he saw an orange flash—a flashlight beam or a flame—and imagined it was sheltered by a tiled roof. “I told you I didn’t want to go away,” Yoel said. When Yonatan looked to the right, he saw Yoel slumped forward with his chin on the wheel.
Yonatan had to tamp down a smile: maybe there was something amusing about the whole story—all those years—pooling into this stupid black field. He stared at the heating vent and his memory galloped through a horde of pictures, and suddenly he was filled with wonder: how, over all the years, despite all the clues, some of which Yoel must have left intentionally, had he never been suspicious, even for a second? The whole story about how Yoel had wandered around the wadi in his Sabbath clothes and run into the tower kids, maybe ten of them, and they’d knocked him down and rolled him in the mud and over stones and over thistles—it had never happened.