Sometimes he wants to tell Itamar about the dead. Not exactly tell him—just make sure he knows these people once existed. Itamar sits on his lap, running his fingers over his arm while they look at pictures on the phone together—mom, dad, child—and he is tempted to skip to pictures of Yoel and his mother, so the boy will see their faces, even for an instant, in a medley of other faces. It seems illogical to him that his son will not know that these people were in the world. But at the last minute he always changes his mind. Once he and Itamar were walking, holding hands, down the hill near the yellow building where Yoel lived before he left Tel Aviv. He sang an Israeli rock song he used to like: You might find something to write about, and Itamar giggled the next lyrics: Not something deep, something sweet, a love story. He could have avoided the street, as he usually did, but something drove him there with Itamar. He looked up at the third floor, where Yoel had lived for years—the place where they’d spent days and nights, where Yoel had shattered, the place he’d left as a changed man to go back home—and tried to find something to say. The building somehow looked emptied, as if everything had been sucked out of it and it was now a mere replica of the life that once was, perfect and therefore so painful. The indifference of inanimate objects to the life that had been around them and inside them—he never really got used to that. Finally he said to Itamar, “Look how pretty that building is.” A dull pain spread through his body when Itamar remarked, “Yellow house.”
When they got home, Itamar told Shira: “Daddy, yellow house.”
“Which house?” she asked.
“Daddy, yellow-yellow house,” Itamar repeated.
Shira asked, “Did Daddy show you a yellow house?”
Yonatan stood looking at the two of them curled up on the couch, like a boy afraid he would get caught.
The seasons of the year, weekends, holidays, parties at kindergarten, vacations, rituals every day and every week, the division of labor, lists on the fridge—Itamar’s schedule, and therefore theirs too, filled up with events and customs, and the passing of time once again took on the outline of the place they lived in, as if they’d gone back to listening to its rhythm, its ceremonies, its songs, as they’d done in childhood. On autumn and winter days he imagined the sunlight striking narrow, filthy streets with no trees, deterring any breeze, and how every morning he would reach Itamar’s kindergarten drenched with sweat. He knew it took patience, moderation and fortitude to get through a Tel Aviv summer, and he was afraid he would not have the strength for it. But summer came and he grew accustomed to it.
In the mornings the sky is high and clear, glimmering in a bright purple-blue. He is impressed by its beauty, and teaches Itamar to be impressed. He learns the names of flowers and trees, learns species of butterflies and birds, learns about the tide—he never imagined how many simple things he did not know. They learn to love the lengthening daylight hours, when the leaves rustle on the trees around their house, a soft breeze blows into the room to whirl the dusty, sweaty air they breathe. They learn to love the graying, blurring sky that leans onto their rooftop and hides airplanes in its folds.
Itamar is aware of every aircraft, near or far. Sometimes he points and shouts, “Airplane!” and Yonatan spots something behind a cluster of clouds, but sometimes by the time he looks up the airplane is gone. Itamar’s interest in airplanes is connected with Yonatan’s travels—in the boy’s world he has always just come home, even if he hasn’t traveled for months. Itamar’s perception confirms his own sense that his presence in the home is somehow unsteady. Not his physical presence, because he spends a lot of time with the boy, but even though at times he is fully there, playing and showering him with hugs and kisses and enticing him to talk, the next moment he’ll be gone, pulled out of his own body to watch the events in his own home from the outside. He knows that Itamar notices these moments when his presence blurs, that he watches suspiciously as his father battles his way back into his body with exaggerated gestures of affection, feeble questions, halfhearted offers to play.
Shira says that she only understands these past few years when she reads his books. It happens to her with every new book: she looks back on many of their exchanges, which had seemed coincidental—why he asked certain questions, dwelled on certain topics, interrogated her about an experience or a choice of dress—and understands that he was not really present. What she doesn’t say, although it’s on the tip of her tongue, and his, is that when she reads his books she feels cheated, sometimes even betrayed. That his writing molds intimate moments from her memory into different, unfamiliar shapes and she can no longer cling to them, no longer draw strength from them, no longer find comfort in evidence of their intimacy on days when their love seems faded. He wonders if this is what he has learned: to slip away from a place while still being there. And that his and Yoel’s fear of being trapped in a life from which no other possibilities branch off still lives in him, except that he has constructed a place he can always retreat into, while Yoel had no such place and, therefore, regarded Yonatan with both admiration and contempt.
Tali said that when Yoel and Yonatan were together, their fears were united, but when each of them returned to his own world, they split off. She also said that the things Shira supposedly discovered in his books could also lead to the opposite conclusion about their love: Shira was growing alienated from him, and she chose to see things—things that might be beautiful—in a different light because she did not believe she could help him.
One night Itamar had a high fever. He lay in bed convulsing and was unresponsive when they called his name, and they rushed him to the hospital. For weeks afterwards, Yonatan was afraid to retreat into his absences when he was at home. He was alert, prepared for any development, and examined every detail of his behavior that night—every minute wasted, every flash of panic, every error or inattention. He made sure he had the phone numbers of several taxi companies and the ambulance, examined the fastest routes from their house to Ichilov Hospital, and every night before they fell asleep he made sure both their cell phones were charged. When he was younger, his father once told him that he only paid attention to detail and demonstrated thoroughness when he was writing, and that no one who knew him could understand it. But now he doggedly transferred those calculations—examining the minutiae of every plot twist, filling out every facet of his fictional world, handling all the little discrepancies—to his plans in case they had to rush Itamar to the hospital again. He let Shira in on only a small portion of these scenarios, because he was afraid of her reaction, but when he was leaving for a two-day trip to Jerusalem, he couldn’t hold back and made her sit down with the notebook where he’d written everything. She sat on the couch as he went through it, page by page. Finally, she gave him an astonished look and said: “It’s been four months since we were at the ER. What disaster are you really preparing for?”
Sometimes he opens his eyes in the morning and wants to scream.
He and Shira curl up on the couch one night, watching footage from the two-year memorial for his mother. The twentieth anniversary of her death is coming up, and he and his father are planning to gather friends and family to watch the old event together. Earlier in the week he digitized the dusty videotape Yoel found that day in the storage unit, and burned CDs to give out to the guests. On the computer screen they see a young man in a long black coat that is too big and makes his body look rectangular. His hair is long and tangled and his complexion pale. He drums his hands on the sides of the podium and does not look up at the audience even once, keeping his eyes on a yellow piece of paper. “Many daughters have done valiantly, but thou excellest them all,” he concludes and steps off the stage. Yonatan doesn’t remember using that quote from Proverbs: it sounds flowery, exaggerated, unrelated to his mother. A week before the memorial he’d gone to see a fellow soldier he knew, whose father ran a yeshiva in a settlement. (They’d already exchanged all the predictable barbs—You’re Arab-lovers, you’re murderers, you’re giving away the land, you’re robbing the land, you cried like babies after Rabin was assassinated, you danced like assholes.) He’d decided he needed a biblical quote to pull his eulogy together, an imitation of something, perhaps the floweriness of a Moshe Dayan speech that he and his father had once read. He had asked to speak at the memorial, although no one had expected him to, and he believed it was appropriate to quote from the scriptures: this was the first time anyone except his mother would hear something he’d written. Now he hates that soldier for not giving him a better verse.
When the screen goes dark and they hear a soft chorus singing ‘U’netaneh Tokef,’ a liturgical song his mother liked, Shira asks when he last watched the tape. He lies and says it was a few years ago, and does not tell her that what has haunted him and made him avoid ever watching it, the thing that he had trouble even contemplating, was that his mother would have preferred that he not get up to describe her and admit his weaknesses and ask forgiveness “from the woman I did not know how to talk to, and to whom I caused sorrow, but who was at the top of my priorities,” or something like that.
He saw her face before his eyes on many mornings, and it was not any different with Yoel so far—in fact it was worse. For months, perhaps a year, the dead person’s face was always there, and then there would be the occasional awakening when he would shake him off, and then he would wake up and not see him at all, and finally he would see him only rarely and would sometimes think of him without pain stabbing his chest. But then he would see the face again and the pain would strike as if it had only been a week since his death. There was no clear movement in one direction—getting further away from the death of a loved one—but rather loops, intersections, U-turns. And there was the wildness of memory.
——
When he woke up in the hotel in the early evening, a blurry newspaper clipping flickered on his phone screen. He held the phone closer—it was slippery and smelled of beer and sweat—took a deep breath and enlarged the picture: black-and-white squares with lots of words and numbers down the side. His eyes moistened and stung. Something floated in his right eye, a speck of glass or a crumb; he could follow it from right to left, as though he were looking into his own eye. Perhaps when he’d crashed into bed before dawn, after saying goodbye to Carlos and Elizabeth on the rooftop—he’d stayed there to watch them leave the hotel, two spots of tar, granted human features for a moment by the glimmer of dawn, until they disappeared among the trees—he hadn’t noticed that there was still some powder on the pillow and sheets, and now it was in his eyes.
He picked up a bottle of water from the nightstand, tipped it onto his eyes and rinsed them. The water trickled down his chest. He felt better. He looked at the image again. It was a cryptic crossword, with one of the clues circled in red pen: “The boy who walked through fire sees no vineyard in the coastal city.” He assumed his father had sent the picture and that the answer had something to do with his name or one of his book titles. He read the clue a few times but hadn’t the faintest idea of the answer.
He was pleased to find no other messages. A lightness caressed his limbs, which seemed to still hold the memory of the warmth they’d been swaddled in last night on the rooftop. He played “The Rat” by The Walkmen on his laptop, and the guitar sounds lit up a wild spark in him—when had his mind turned into a fear machine, anyway? He looked at the picture again, then sent it to a Facebook group, to Tali and Shira, to two other friends, and finally to Yoel: it occurred to him that the clue had something to do with Beit HaKerem, because of the vineyard—kerem. He wasn’t expecting Yoel to answer or even see the message; he’d sent him a few from Mexico and Yoel hadn’t responded.
Then he smoked a cigarette by the pool. A group of young people drinking beer and champagne was taking up most of the tables. One of them was talking in a faint Russian accent to a girl in a white sundress who rolled a silver pipe between her fingers, about how his father was in prison because he’d shot two people at a party, like that rapper 50 Cent. He told her they didn’t talk anymore, and that he wanted to be a professional golfer. She said she was going home to Houston to open a business, maybe a boutique hotel or a little restaurant. Her chestnut hair fluttered in the wind when they raised their champagne flutes, and after she’d had a few sips she tipped her head back, and took a puff from the pipe. A ribbon of colorful paper stuck out from her glass.
He went back to his room. The carpet was littered with miniature bottles, empty bags of chips, candy bar wrappings, a few cigarette butts, damp towels, a white hair ribbon. He shoved everything into the trash can. Then he sat down at the desk, pushed open the door to the garden with his foot, and savored the breeze.
Shira answered: It’s easy, but you can solve it on your own.
Talia wrote: WTF.
Yoel wrote: So the boy doesn’t see Beit HaKerem from Tel Aviv? Stunned that Yoel had responded, he started writing messages only to erase them. He tried a friendly admonition, then loving words, then casual amusement. Finally, wrote: I don’t know, we’re bad at this stuff, aren’t we?
Yoel: Maybe not so much anymore.
He sent Yoel a private message: So you’ve finally showed up. How are you?
Outside the hotel, waves were surging in the large sunken basin, spraying white foam. For the first time he also noticed that the basin itself was swaying back and forth slightly, and for some time he stood watching it, trying to decide if the dizzying movement of the waves was simulating the motion of the basin or if it really was moving. It was one of those things that never bothered him except when he was writing, and then he became aware of minute details everywhere and filled entire notebooks describing them.
The quiet in the hotel made him gloomy. He went back to his room and started packing, piling up dirty laundry, shoving it into plastic bags which he placed on the bottom of the suitcase, then books which he’d been given by writers at the festival.
When he heard the knocks he hoped he was dreaming. As they got louder, he assumed he was awake. He sat down on his bed in the dark and listened. Colorful moths flitted around the lamp outside, storming the light only to recoil. He focused on them while a faint voice whispered that he had one more blink of an eye, one final flutter in the disoriented seam between consciousness and unconsciousness, and then there would be resolution. He knew it already. The knocking grew louder still. He got up and threw a towel over his shoulders. As soon as his hand touched the door, the scene became fully coherent.
A hotel worker whose face he did not recognize pointed to the room phone and said something in Spanish. He looked around for his cell phone in the tangle of sheets. His fingers gripped the curtain when the hotel phone rang. He picked up the receiver and heard Shira’s voice dimly, as if he’d been fished out of a dream. She said Rachel had called her because she couldn’t get hold of him, and that it was the last thing she wanted to have to tell him.
He heard footsteps in the hallway, whispers, then a buzz. Sometimes in the middle of the night the hallway lights creaked and hummed, and in the morning everything was quiet again. Two big moths floated around the lamp in the garden, and then there were four.
“I have to call Rachel,” he said.
Shira said she didn’t want him to be alone, and he said yes, okay, and asked her not to be alone with Itamar, to call her parents: Talk to them now, he repeated, talk to them now. He hung up, kneeled on the floor and searched for his cell phone. He crawled around the bed between towels and sweaty shirts and underwear and rolled up bills of money, until he found it. He turned off the lamp, sat leaning on the wall, and called Rachel.
Yoel is gone, she said. Their father had found him at 4 a.m., unresponsive. He realized she’d already told lots of people: it was 10 a.m. in Israel. We’ve lost him, she said, and he murmured, Yes. Maybe we lost him a long time ago, she said. You did everything for him, he told her, you couldn’t do anything more. He stared at the moths in the garden, making colorful loops and arcs in the beam of light, little whirlwinds of light dancing in the air. He did not ask any questions, though perhaps she was expecting him to, and he prayed she would not give any more details. They were quiet. Finally she said the funeral would be on Monday at midday. He heard chairs moving, voices talking. She said they’d see him at the funeral.
He looked at the screen again and reread Yoel’s answer, sent exactly nine hours earlier. It was all planned by then, probably. “Write something nice about me,” Yoel had told him in one of those conversations he’d always been in a hurry to cut off. “Give the whole thing a romantic, inspirational touch, don’t be a dick.” He lost all sensation in his body, as if he’d become an airy, weightless dream figure. He put his hands on the textured wall and rubbed them hard until his right wrist bled, and at once his body was slammed back to the ground. He remembered how he’d stood on his balcony and told a friend that one morning they would wake up and Yoel would be gone. But even when he’d said it clearly, declaring that this was how things were, still there was a part in the recess of his heart—unsteady, swelling and shrinking, but always there—that believed it would not really happen. And perhaps he’d said it to that friend to trick hope into revealing itself and making its argument.
Shira asked if he’d called anyone, and he lied and said yes, people were coming to see him soon. She said: You didn’t call anyone, did you? He answered: No. She asked him to describe the hotel room. He turned on the light. He said he was standing at the foot of the bed and there was a desk with a lamp, and a textured white wall with a black-and-white photograph of children running to the sea, and on the carpet was a suitcase, and outside there were butterflies swirling around the light. She asked if he wanted to lie on the bed and talk. He didn’t answer. She said he would get through this night and then they would be together again, the three of them. He said he would get through this night, and he stared at the shirts hanging in the closet, scrutinizing the creases around the collars.
He hurried down the hallway and walked out of the hotel. Cold gusts of air hit him, scratching his face with their fingernails as if the wind had split up into sharp gusts that dug into him from every direction. He felt lots of little fires burning on his skin. The top of the only tree in front of the hotel slammed against the wall. A bundle of leaves flew over him when he stopped next to the two doormen in black coats huddled in the wooden hut with a leaking roof. It was raining, he realized. He asked them for a light and one of them held out a lighter. He held it but his hand must have been shaking, because the doorman took it and lit his cigarette, then pointed to a bench: Señor, sentarse en el banco. He heard bells ringing and his voice asking, in Hebrew: Do you hear the bells? He stared at the stains and rips in their uniforms—like Yoel’s uniform in that hotel he’d worked at. At first glance they always looked shiny and perfect, but if you looked closer you found frayed threads, stains, unmatched buttons. Yoel said: Some things in this world are only good for one look.
The water in the marble basin frothed. He noticed a rubbery taste in his mouth from the cigarette, which had gone out. Shiny black cars slid silently onto the driveway and they looked massive, the way objects in his room used to when he was feverish. A swarm of bronzed young men poured out of the cars, wearing tailored pants and button-down shirts, all carrying blazers folded over one arm and rolling black suitcases. They joked and laughed, anticipating the pleasures of the next few days. He watched them until they merged into one big ball of light rolling through the lobby. Perhaps he hadn’t really understood all of Yoel’s talk about summer, treating it as a noise he had to silence so that they could talk about the really important things—coming back to life, a hopeful future, an apartment in Tel Aviv, a job. He’d tried to use memories of the past to reignite Yoel’s lust for life. “I’ve had thirty-five wonderful years in the world,” Yoel had said, and he’d alluded to the summer and to his own death with gravity. He seemed to have wanted Yonatan’s opinion, as if he believed Yonatan had access to something unseen, even asking him how he felt when he killed off a character he was attached to in his books. But Yonatan had insisted on diverting their conversation back to life and the possibilities it held, even on the day when they’d stood at the top of the park looking out on Beit HaKerem and had contemplated Yoel’s death. It was exactly what everyone used to do to his mother in hospital: those who are close to death want to talk about it, but no one really listens to them. We purport to want to cheer up the dying and instill them with hope, but in fact we don’t want to hear everything, preferring that death surprise us a little, even when we have all the evidence before us. And if Yonatan had truly listened to all that talk of death and the harsh summer? Everything would have been exactly the same, people would tell him. But he would never know.
In the end it was fairly simple: they wanted Yoel—even fifty percent of him—to stay at his parents’ home, in his old room, even when he was lying in bed in the dark for days on end without talking to anyone, even when he no longer took an interest in them, when he frightened them, when he made them doubt the foundations of their lives, even when they knew Yoel didn’t really care if they existed or vanished forever. They wanted him to be, and Yoel did not want to be, because in the end it was him lying on his childhood bed, looking at the ceiling and seeing the things he saw, and he did not want to see them anymore.
The chiming of bells had given way to the trickling of water in the basin. The pictures I’m seeing are too lucid, he thought, and so are the memories. It’s supposed to be different, I’m supposed to be stunned. Or perhaps it only blurs in retrospect, and years later you say: we were in a blur, we didn’t see anything, it was all glinting and graying and igniting and blackening. When in fact we were too clear-sighted when they died.
He stood up and his legs had fallen asleep and they hurt. In the lobby he looked at the digital bulletin board where upcoming events were displayed. It would be morning soon. He prayed it would come quick. He wandered from one wing to the next—California, St. Petersburg, he got lost in Cairo—until he was at his door. Inside, he sat down on the bed and looked around. Then he went to the closet and started folding clothes and placing them in the suitcase: pants, T-shirts, a scarf and sweaters, black shoes. He took the shirts off the hangers, folded them and put them on top of the pile, and when daylight broke and the last of the moths were gone, he fastened the suitcase shut and dragged it to the door.
——
In the afternoons of the final days of summer, before Itamar started kindergarten, they often went to the beach. At five they would leave home and stroll down Bograshov Street, switching from one sidewalk to the other in a set order; the floodlit sections and the shady ones always followed the same pattern. He talked constantly to Itamar in the stroller, asking him more and more questions, so that he could hear his voice when he could not see his face. They crossed at the big intersection, stayed close to the stone wall along the narrow street, walked down a staircase, and there was the sea. There was always something sudden in that moment of revelation, and the sight expanded his heart. He swung Itamar up and pointed to the sea, wondering if the boy felt something too.
A few times he imagined that there on the sand—with the wind in his face, the water lapping at his feet, as he held hands with Itamar in the waves—his body and soul were airing out, taking respite from the sweltering expanse whose borders were constantly being redrawn around him. He never felt so much a prisoner of his memories as he did at the end of summer. And it was not only memories: he was watching Itamar growing up, knowing that in a few years the boy would lose interest in Shira. Sometimes Shira, amused, said she knew it was going to happen, and he wanted to warn her that she was only laughing because she didn’t understand; you cannot understand a thing like that until it happens. There, on the sand, a tremor ran through his body at the vision of eight-year-old Itamar’s betrayal, even as he bounced the two-year-old boy in his arms. He wondered if it really was the future picture that worried him, because after all the foolish notion of a child betraying his mother was also a memory. “What do you call a memory that isn’t exactly a memory?” he asked Itamar, and the boy kicked sand in the air and shrieked: “Memory!”
Sometimes when they walked away from the beach, before evening fell, and he was sweaty and tired and itchy, he thought he must look like that man who performs the tasks of life, fights the fights, talks the talk and worries the worries, and keeps the books: the man whom Yoel used to describe with such contempt, the man he had feared he would become—and now never would. Yonatan had sometimes feared it too. But ultimately, there are those who leave and those who stay, and the ones who stay not only have the years ahead of them, but also all the time that has gone, with its pictures that emerge sometimes, rising from the depths, as new in one’s mind as the current experiences, changing one’s perception of an entire era in the blink of an eye. When the gray glass sky sheltered the city, he pushed Itamar home in the stroller and the boy dozed, and he touched his neck to check his body temperature, then bent over and took his shoes off, shook the sand out, put them in a bag, drew the shelter over the stroller and walked up the street.
There were mosquitoes everywhere—on the walls, on the ceilings, on the pictures and the books—and they attacked them, killing them with a broom or a magazine, or with hands already bleeding, until, approaching midnight, they decided there was no choice but to sleep in the living room, where it was cooler because of the wind from the wadi, and they spread a sheet over the rug and lay down, the four of them—Mom, Dad, Shaul and him—and kept bumping into each other, hands, feet and arms squirming because there wasn’t enough room, and Dad said, “Enough, it’s time to sleep,” but then he cleared his throat and Shaul said, “Quiet, we’re sleeping as of…now!” and after a minute Dad started snoring and they laughed, and Mom said, “Everyone go to sleep now, no talking,” in a clear bell of a voice—for the first time since she’d died he could hear the sound of her voice, in the middle of bustling Bograshov Street—and Shaul burped and laughed, and Mom grumbled that they were pushing her onto the balcony, and Dad moved his arm to make room and crushed him with his large body, and he let out a screech that made Shaul jump, and a soft breeze blew on their faces, and the warmth from Dad and Shaul flowed into his body from either side, and the shadows of the trees trembled on the walls in the light patches cast by the streetlamps, and he was moved by their beauty and even more so by the fact that there was no school tomorrow, that Shaul had just arrived and would stay for several weeks, and that all the summer he could imagine was still ahead.
Tel Aviv
2015–2018