Three Hours from Berlin
1.
TAMARA INSTANTLY RECOGNIZED HIM, despite the new round-rimmed glasses and black beard adorning his face. Unfortunately he recognized her as well, and she realized they were condemned to talk. She hoped the conversation would be brief, but knew the chances were slim: a preliminary update would take at least two minutes, reminiscing about their university days three minutes, and a general account of his life in Germany another five. And god help her if they accidently stumbled upon the subject of housing prices in Berlin.
Approaching him, she feigned a smile.
“Well well well,” she affected surprise.
“I know, right?” he replied and hugged her. His red sweater was soft and thick. “What brings you to Hadera?”
“A three-day seminar.”
“Wow, terrific. What’s the topic?”
“Taxes in the digital age,” she said, boring even herself. All she could remember was that his name was Michael Tsabari, that he had studied accounting with her in Jerusalem, and that one day, sometime after graduation, he had moved to Germany and become a video artist in a small town whose name she couldn’t remember. “But never mind that, what’s going on with you? What are you doing in Israel?”
He told her he was here on a short visit, something work-related, but she wasn’t really listening. Sometimes, when engaging in such meaningless conversations, she felt like throwing in a random question like “Do you believe in god?” or “What did you dream of becoming as a kid?” But this time she couldn’t even toy with the possibility, because he apologized and said he had to rush off, had a meeting with a famous curator who was interested in his art. “Too bad I don’t have a few more minutes,” he said and disappeared into the nearby alley. She found herself offended without knowing why.
2.
AT THE END of each day, she’d put the kettle on, study the white bits swimming at the bottom, and make herself a cup of black coffee with sweetener. Then she’d settle onto the living room couch, rest her tablet against her legs, and peek into the life of one of her hundreds of distant, virtual friends. That evening she checked out Micael’s profile, devoting considerable time to the matter:
One year in Germany and still don’t get Brecht
How do I break it to Grandpa that I’ve become a Bayern fan?
#MilkyProtest: It is cheaper in Berlin—but I still don’t like Milky pudding.
She thought about how there were three types of people in the world: those whose lives were worse than hers, those whose lives were just as boring as hers, and those whose lives she couldn’t help but be jealous of. In Tsabari’s case, one photo at a world heritage site and she succumbed without a fight. Tamara perused a few more photos. Michael was a good-looking guy. There was a childlike quality to his smile, especially against the sober black jacket he wore in many of the photos. Some of them featured a chubby German woman with a permanent smile on her face. Tamara wondered whether she was his girlfriend, thinking how she herself would never dare date a German man. She concluded that his life was better than hers, turned on the TV, and watched a trivia show in which the eliminated contestants plummeted through a trapdoor in the floor. Within less than an hour, Michael Tsabari had joined the dozens of people she was very jealous of and then completely forgot about. But later that night, he called.
He began by apologizing for running off in the middle of their conversation.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t give away how moved she was by this gesture.
“Maybe we could meet again?”
She didn’t reply, but Michael was persistent—informing her that he would be in Hadera again tomorrow, and would love it if she could make time for him. He admitted he had a favor to ask, and that “it wouldn’t be right asking over the phone.”
She considered declining, but Michael’s odd request provided her with the rare opportunity to forgo lunch with her boss, who always ordered the most expensive dishes on the menu and then insisted they split the bill. She told Michael she would have an hour-long break during the seminar, to which he replied that he wouldn’t need more than that. He gave her the address of a café, asked her not to talk about their impending meeting, and once again ended their conversation abruptly. She tried to continue watching TV, but couldn’t stop wondering what he wanted from her. Even if she wouldn’t admit it, this sudden interest that crept into her life was not unsatisfying.
3.
THEY AGREED TO meet at one of those health cafés Tamara was sure existed only in Tel Aviv. It started to drizzle on her way there, and she wondered whether it was a good or bad sign. She sat at a window-side table. The walls were covered in light green wallpaper scribbled with tips for good living: “Switch to Soy, Go with the Flow, Communication Is Key.” She had no intention of implementing any of them. In honor of the occasion, she wore a thin gold necklace with an antique coin pendant, which she now played with, sliding it from side to side.
He arrived wearing the black jacket from the photos, sat in front of her, and smiled.
“Pretty swanky for lunch in Hadera,” she smirked. “Add a top hat and you’d look like a bona fide English gentleman.”
He laughed and said he had left his pipe at home. He signaled to the waiter and ordered a spicy shakshouka with homemade bread. She felt like ordering the same thing but chose the lentil salad. The waiter cleared the menus, and the first thirty minutes of their conversation were dedicated to her impressive-but-entirely-made-up career aspirations and to his decision to move to Germany.
“I started toying with the idea the summer before I moved,” he said, and told her he had spent the entire month of August on Rothschild Boulevard, two tents away from Daphni Leef. He had been hoping the protest would finally change things in the country, but once the tents had been taken down he realized that wasn’t about to happen. Had she been in a more argumentative mood, she would have told him he sounded like a soccer fan who switches teams after one loss. But she wasn’t.
“You want to explain why we’re here?”
“It’s kind of complicated,” he replied.
“Hence the explain.”
He silently dipped his fork into the tomato sauce and dragged it over some egg white. “I wasn’t supposed to be here yesterday,” he said, and looked up at her.
“No one’s ever supposed to be in Hadera,” she said, happy when she got a laugh out of him.
“I meant in Israel,” he continued, his voice trembling. He said he was keeping his visit a secret, and asked her not to tell anyone she had seen him.
“Who would I tell?” she asked, trying to understand.
“I don’t know, just don’t,” he replied and leaned into her. “I’m going to ask you a weird question, okay?”
“Try me.”
“Let’s say,” he began slowly, weighing his words, “someone approaches you. He offers you a one-way ticket, and promises a life unlike anything you have known before. Would you go for it?”
“Someone with a jacket and a top hat?”
He smiled.
“What’s the catch?”
“That you don’t know where you’re going,” he said, his expression turning sober. “And you can’t tell the people you love that you’re leaving.”
“I don’t think so,” she said hesitantly.
“Got it,” he said, and without any warning raised his hand and signaled to the waiter for the bill. “I have to go.”
“What?”
“I have to go.”
“Would you explain what’s going on here?” she asked, shocked that he’d asked her out for lunch just to ditch her halfway through.
“I’ll tell everyone I saw you,” she said, insisting on getting an answer.
“No, you won’t,” he determined, attempting a friendly tone.
“Watch me,” she replied, and glanced at her phone on the table. The idea had just popped into her head. “I’ll share us on Facebook,” she announced.
She would look back at that moment for years to come; offer herself long, reasoned explanations about why she had insisted on not letting him go. In her heart of hearts she’d know that the real answer was simple—she was lonely and didn’t want to say goodbye to the person who had accidentally knocked on the door to her life.
“Remind me of your last name again? Tsabari?” she asked as if she didn’t already know.
He snuck a glance at her phone. “You mean check-in, not share,” he corrected her, scratching his beard nervously. “You used to be nicer,” he noted.
She knew he was right.
“When are you going back to Germany?” she asked, and when he didn’t answer, started typing in his name to let him know she meant business. “When are you going back?”
“Never,” he replied with sharp, uncontrollable resolve. She looked up from her screen and considered him, realizing he had divulged more than he had intended.
The waiter appeared with the bill, cleared their plates, and they both withdrew into themselves. Michael removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes until they turned red.
She thought she had taken it too far.
4.
“THE SUMMER AFTER the protest I was already in Berlin,” he said with fixed sighs between sentences. He told her that three hours after landing in Berlin he had already rented an apartment with some hipster drummer. He spent the following two weeks like an overenthusiastic Japanese tourist, trying to capture the city through his camera lens and, for a few moments, even felt he had almost succeeded. He took a guided tour of the Reichstag and got drunk in six different pubs in Kreuzberg. He said the hipster drummer even hooked him up with a job at a record store in the neighborhood, and the Lebanese chick from the apartment upstairs had already hit on him twice.
“Sounds great,” she said, to which he replied that indeed it was. “But after a month I realized there was no chance in hell I was staying there.”
He explained that from the very first moment he couldn’t stand the cold. All that fatty food. The German language and the ticket inspectors on the U-Bahn who had issued him two fines within less than a month. “I couldn’t even stand the people who were genuinely nice to me.” He described his period there like the first night of summer camp: feeling like you can’t breathe, like someone’s holding a staple gun to your neck. “The problem was I didn’t want to stay in Germany, but I couldn’t come home.”
“Why not?”
He said people wouldn’t understand. Not after he had told his boss he was leaving. Not after he had given up his sweet pad near the market. “Not after lecturing everyone about how no one in Israel had the guts to go after their dreams.”
He told her how one night, in Berlin, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, he pictured himself as a wrinkly eighty-year-old who had lived an entire life he had never wanted.
A tremor shot through her. She felt as though he’d stolen a thought right out of her head and passed it off as his own. He proceeded to say that later that evening, he was browsing Facebook and for a moment, felt an overwhelming desire to take a selfie, lying in bed in his grubby wifebeater and with a dejected look on his face. To upload it onto the social network, “to show everyone how far a cry my Berlin life is from what they thought.” He was about to take that photo but decided at the last moment there was no point. He clicked on his profile and studied the hundreds of pictures he had posted over the years, and felt they all portrayed someone else’s life.
“So you realized Facebook was a giant lie? How perceptive of you.”
He said she was right, but that’s exactly what he found absurd about it. “Everyone knows their virtual persona is a big fat lie, and yet they insist on maintaining and even perfecting it.”
The passion with which he spoke reminded her of herself at sixteen, when she had finished reading Che Guevara’s biography and swore allegiance to the communist revolution, an oath she broke two weeks later when she started working at McDonald’s. “So let me guess,” she said skeptically. “Right then and there, you decided to delete your Facebook account, promised yourself you’d start living an authentic life, and since you were already in the mood, bought one of those self-help books.”
“Quite the opposite,” he replied. “It just made me realize how far I could stretch the lie.”
She didn’t understand. He turned his gaze to the wall. She couldn’t be sure, but assumed he was looking at the poster that hung there: “Join a gym. Not tomorrow. Today.”
“Are you living the life you wanted?” he asked.
“Yes,” she lied.
“Then there’s no point trying to explain.”
Once again they sat in front of each other in utter silence. She glanced at the clock on her phone while he fished a hundred-shekel bill out of his pocket and put it on the table.
“Please, don’t tell anyone we met,” he said, got up, and walked out of the café. She didn’t try to stop him. Instead, she went to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror; her mascara had smudged under her left eye. She stuck out her tongue and laughed, then thought to herself that she had to start working out. Maybe volleyball.
She managed to make it to the final lecture, something about hi-tech corporations and regulation. She sat down in the back row and closed her eyes, recalling that when she was little, she used to close her eyes and feel as if the whole world disappeared along with her.
5.
IF IT WEREN’T for the photo, they probably never would have spoken again. Two hours later, when she logged into Facebook, she saw what he had posted. Michael stood there in a blue coat, smiling and pointing at a sign in German behind him. For a moment, she thought it was an old photo that had popped up in her feed, but then she noticed it had been posted twenty-seven minutes ago. The location—Germany—appeared below, along with a status that left little room for doubt: “If I spotted a spelling mistake, does that mean I’m finally a local?”
The facts didn’t add up even when she tried her hardest to make them, but eventually she decided to let it go.
She went back to the office the following day. It was a busy period, like always, and she was looking for excuses to leave early. She made plans to go out with the head of human resources, a short, chipper girl, three years younger than her. She felt it was a great opportunity to prove to herself that she could make new friends. But after an hour, during which the head of human resources insisted they rank the five hottest men in the office, Tamara felt their relationship had run its course. When she got home, she shared on Facebook Ehud Banai’s song about the thirty-year-old boy. She felt that the songs she shared offered the world some insight into her existential state. She never got a single like for the songs she shared, and perhaps that was the reason she shared them so often. Then she went over her WhatsApp contact list, hoping to find some forgotten loved one. When she reached the letter M, she saw Michael’s face. She clicked on the photo and zoomed in. He was holding a beer bottle and staring into the camera with a serious expression, looking tougher than in real life. She thought to herself that maybe that’s what he meant by stretching the lie.
The green dot appeared by his name. She forwarded him his Facebook photo with the German sign and added: “Funny status, I just don’t understand how you made it to Germany so quickly …”
He called not a moment later. “I gather you saw the photo,” he said.
She didn’t reply.
“Listen, it’s a funny story, but …” His voice was swallowed by the loud background noise.
“Where are you?”
Dodging the question, he carried on with his confused monologue. She focused on the background noise, picking up on a mechanical voice blaring over loudspeakers: “Special offer, three Cokes for ten shekels!”
“You’re still in Israel,” she determined, surprised by her own conclusion.
He was quiet for a few moments before asking, “What do you want?”
“An explanation.”
“I can’t give you one over the phone.”
“Then let’s meet,” she replied. She thought she may have taken it a step too far, but decided to wait for his reaction.
“Hadera Stream?” he suggested.
She agreed, but not before feigning hesitation.
6.
THE FOLLOWING DAY at four, she excused herself from the office and drove to Hadera in the beat-up Subaru Leone she had bought two years ago from a redheaded fellow who lived on a settlement in the West Bank. The three chimneys from the power plant loomed large as she parked, then took the stairs down to the stream. Michael was already there, standing with his hands in the pockets of his gray wool coat. She quietly crept up behind him as he gazed out at the water. She put her hand on his shoulder, and he turned around.
“I’ll explain everything,” he said.
“Wait,” she replied, wanting to take it slowly. She stood beside him, contemplating the stream. When she was little, she had promised herself that when she grew up she’d live outdoors. She took a deep breath and sat down on the bench. Michael remained standing. “You’re welcome to sit,” she said.
He sat beside her with a straight back. The sun was collapsing into the horizon. He told her about a poet who had once immortalized the stream, but he couldn’t remember the poem’s name.
“That’s not exactly a line to make a woman fall for you.”
“I’m supposed to make you fall for me?” he replied with utter seriousness.
She smiled, enjoying the fact that she couldn’t fracture his innocence. “That’s up to you.” It was cold, and they both started exhaling trails of white steam.
“Remember I told you about that time I stood in front of the mirror and pictured myself as an eighty-year-old?” he asked, and said that was the moment he realized his social network identity could free him. A “get-out-of-reality-free card,” he called it. A card that would enable him to do what he had never before thought possible: live the life he wanted to live, and at the same time, the life that was expected of him. He confessed that he had never been a video artist. After a month in Berlin he came home and had spent the past year here, in his room, in a tiny apartment with its back to the sea.
She listened to the note of excitement trilling through his voice, a note produced by someone divulging a big secret for the first time. She sidled up against him, placed her hand on his knee, felt it tremble.
“It’s cold,” she said.
Michael told her about his alternate biography. How he had chosen video art as a profession because it was a field no one around him knew anything about, and a town a three-hour’s drive from Berlin, so that no Israeli would think to come looking for him. He said he spent a week driving up and down Germany in a rental, taking thousands of photos with a chubby German girl who wasn’t even his girlfriend, but a failed actress he had hired for the shoot.
She told him that she had lied once too, when she posted a photo of her and a friend from the summit of Mount Kinneret, with a caption about having climbed their way up, when in reality they had taken the Subaru, which barely made it.
“Living on the edge, huh?” he said.
“’Cause moving to the burbs is really flirting with danger, right? You’re quite the daredevil,” she said, giving his ribs a gentle poke.
“I chose this city after careful consideration,” he said, explaining that he went over his friend list on Facebook and made sure not one of them lived there. Then reasoned that it was far enough from his family and friends in Jerusalem, and not interesting enough for them to choose it for a spontaneous weekend vacation.
“And yet, here I am,” she replied.
“A glitch, for sure,” he replied, and placed his hand on her shoulder in an awkward gesture, pulling her closer to him.
She was moved.
“You know, it sounds a bit cowardly, running away like this,” she said, and when noticing his expression felt that yet again she had ruined a good thing before it had even begun. She leaned into him and kissed his lips gently, as if to compensate. They drew their faces apart and smiled. He took her hands in his and warmed them up.
They met once every few days. At first his refusal to step outside the borders of Hadera upset her, but with time she came to love the city in which things happened and didn’t happen simultaneously. She’d leave work early at least twice a week, reassuring herself that she’d make up the hours the following month. She enjoyed the whispers of her colleagues as they tried to guess where she was slipping off to. “I’m sorry, but I really can’t say,” she’d reply and consider their intrigued expressions, feeling as if she was holding in her hands something real they could only wish for.
They mostly met at the café, but every so often scheduled a date somewhere foreign to romance: the HMO cafeteria, a bench outside the Social Security offices. During these meetings—limited in time and space—she always divulged more than she intended. She told him about the scar on the back of her neck, about the first and only time she smoked weed, about that day she ran away from home at fourteen, took a bus to the beach and stayed there all night, only to come home in the morning and learn that her mother had been taken to the hospital for a panic attack. He always nodded understandingly, and she wasn’t sure how to deal with his persistent refusal to be cynical toward anything she said.
7.
SHE WAS FIRED a month later. Her boss claimed they were forced to make painful cutbacks. She didn’t believe him, but refrained from arguing. Being laid off helped her make up her mind. Michael’s offer had come a week earlier. They were strolling through the Hadera Forest and he told her that until she was there with him, she wouldn’t possibly be able to understand.
“But there is no getting closer than this,” she said, sticking her hand out to measure the tiny distance between them.
“Closeness isn’t a matter of geography,” he asserted, then added that if she really wanted to understand, she’d join him.
“Where?”
“Germany,” he said. “If you have the guts, that is.”
A clipped laugh escaped her. He stopped in his tracks, and she gently brushed her hand over his beard.
“I’m listening. Explain to me how it’s supposed to work,” she said.
“There’s no instruction manual, you just come,” he replied.
She looked up, mumbled something about how it was going to rain, and he stroked the back of her neck and said he couldn’t understand how she could give up a chance for true freedom. She grimaced. Got upset. There was something condescending in what he had said.
“You’re right,” she announced. Then she confessed that maybe she had chosen accounting only because her parents had convinced her to study something practical. And that most of her conversations with her friends were indeed shallow and meaningless, and that yes, she had gotten a nose job when she was eighteen. “But you don’t get it, that’s what holds me together.” She explained that all those restrictions and tiny rules she had adhered to almost religiously were what kept her sane. Made her feel safe. And if watching MasterChef once a week was the price of a normal life, she was willing to pay it.
She wanted to win the argument, but he wouldn’t reply. He withdrew into one of those silences of his.
They made their way back to the car in oppressive silence. A moment before parting, her car door already open, he took a yellow envelope out of his pocket and handed it to her.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“A plane ticket to Berlin,” he said and caressed her cheek. “Two weeks.”
“Hadera or Germany?” she wondered in confusion, and he quickly replied, “Your choice.” He told her she was welcome to use the plane ticket and spend two weeks alone in Berlin. “Or you can come here,” he said, and promised he’d wait for her at the entrance to the train station, that she wouldn’t even have to give him a heads-up. That he’d be there, waiting, in case she decided to show up.
She looked at him and asked if he was trying to make her fall for him.
“That’s up to you,” he replied.
She adjusted the rearview mirror, closed the door, and started the car. She stopped at Apollonia Beach to look at the waves. She had planned on staying there all night to mull over his offer, but the cold got to her after ten minutes. Once again she thought back to the time she ran away from home; today, no one would have a panic attack if she disappeared.
Friday night at her parents’, she announced she was considering a trip to Germany. She rushed to explain that she needed to clear her head, and immediately felt that she had blown her cover. That everyone at the table now knew that for the past two months she’d been in a bizarre relationship with a guy from Hadera who wasn’t even there, and that now she was considering whether to go on a vacation in Germany or to visit him. But her confession received only a nonchalant reaction. Her father recommended a hotel in central Berlin and her aunt patted her on the back and said it was important to have a bit of fun. Tamara smiled, slightly disappointed that once again she had been edged out of the center of attention.
8.
HER PARENTS INSISTED on driving her to the airport; they bid her farewell at the entrance to Ben Gurion, her father looking a little sad, her mother settling for a brief hug and rushing her off to the duty-free shops. Before they said goodbye, she took a selfie with her parents, thinking the ruse should start from the very first moment. She posted the photo along with the status Then we take Berlin, and told herself the tribute to Leonard Cohen made the lie a little less horrible.
She watched them walk away, already missing them terribly.
She entered the airport and slipped into the bathroom; squeezing herself into a stall along with her suitcase, she sidled up against the door, took her phone out of her left pocket, and called the airline. She had prepared an elaborate story for why she couldn’t make the flight, but the customer service lady didn’t even ask. Tamara opened her suitcase and fished out a long floral dress. She had gotten it from her mother a few years ago, and had since announced to anyone who would listen that she’d never wear it, hoping now that putting it on would make her harder to recognize.
Half an hour later, the cleaner having already knocked on the door twice asking if everything was okay, she came out of the stall. Taking the escalator downstairs, she passed by the arrivals hall and made it to the platform two minutes before the train’s departure. She quickly bought a ticket and boarded the last car, plopping her bag onto the seat next to her. Fixing her gaze on the floor, she prayed she wouldn’t run into anyone she knew. She was happy to discover that her selfie with her parents had been awarded eleven likes as well as a comment by some girl she didn’t know, who wrote “couldn’t be more jealous.”
Tamara leaned her head against the window and tried to fall asleep.
9.
HE WAS WAITING for her at the entrance to the station. She didn’t notice him at first, was busy studying her reflection in her cell phone screen. He let out a little cough and she jumped, startled and then embarrassed by the situation. They were silent for a few moments, and he kept staring at her.
“Nice dress,” he said.
“I’m glad you like it,” she replied. “It’s the last time I’m wearing it.”
He hesitated before reaching out and brushing his hand over her hair. There was a certain measure of awe in his touch. She liked it.
“You got a haircut,” she said. His short hair made him look more serious. He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her into him. It had been years since someone had hugged her like that. Tightly. Not her exes, not her friends, not her family. They stood there for a few moments. When he let go of her, she wished he hadn’t. He picked up her suitcase. “Heavy,” he remarked as they descended the staircase.
They headed out of the station and started walking. Tamara was hoping his apartment was close by; she felt as if she had flown halfway across the world.
“We’ll just take two photos for Facebook and then go grab a bite.”
“Can’t it wait till tomorrow?” she asked and let out a giant yawn, but he said that unfortunately there was no time to waste. He explained that the first few hours of the disappearance were critical, since no one had any reason to question it yet. He then told her there were a few places in Hadera that if you photograph them at the right angle and crop part of the background, looked exactly like Berlin.
“If only the people of Hadera knew,” she said.
He smiled.
She considered whether to continue objecting, but curiosity got the better of her.
Not far from the train station there was a stone wall covered in oversized graffiti art.
“What, like the Berlin Wall?” she scoffed. “Listen, it looks nothing like it.”
“Wait,” he said, lowering the suitcase next to a big rock and waving her to follow. He stopped in front of a big drawing of Bob Marley with his eyes closed.
“You’ve thought of everything,” she said, and he smiled contentedly, pointing at the word Legende that appeared next to the painting.
“Why is it misspelled?”
“It’s in German,” he explained. He asked her for her phone, then positioned her with her back to the wall, took a few steps back, and photographed her against the painting.
“Give us a real smile,” he asked, and she said it was difficult to smile when she was afraid of stepping in dog poop.
“We have each other,” he said, and when she looked at the photo she realized he was right. It was awfully easy to create the illusion of happiness.
They hiked up a narrow trail back to the street. He took her hand and blew warm air into it.
She looked at the people trudging along the sidewalk and then at him, thinking how much intimacy had sprung up between them since he had become the only person in the world who knew her exact location.
They went for a bite at a mediocre Italian restaurant. She ordered ravioli with mushrooms and he told her to take a photo of it, preferably from above. She protested, noting that it wasn’t a German dish, but Michael insisted that when it came to photos of food, national indicators were irrelevant.
“Beer is the only telltale,” he argued, and ordered them two bottles of Weihenstephaner. He said he preferred Goldstar, but the ends justified the means.
“So really, you live to impress others.”
“Well, part of the time,” he admitted. “The problem is that others do it all the time.”
His apartment was on the second floor of a building not far from the train station. He said he believed it was a Jewish thing, the need to live next to an exit route. He opened the door and she fumbled her way to the bed before he even turned on the light—as if to say, no more photos. She closed her eyes and after a few moments felt him lying down beside her, his hand reaching out but not touching. She turned around, pressed her face against his, and kissed him. Then she opened her eyes and caressed his cheek. They both smiled mischievously, as if they had pulled one over on the world and lived to tell the tale.
10.
WHEN SHE WOKE up the following morning, a cup of coffee was waiting for her on the bedside table. She looked around curiously, surprised to find out his apartment wasn’t the dim hideout she had imagined it would be. The floor was parquet, the walls a light cream. She recognized textbooks from their university days in the heavy bookcase, above which hung an acoustic guitar. Michael emerged from the kitchen with a tray laden with bread, an omelet, and chopped vegetable salad, saying it was a small, insufficient compensation for persuading her to spend two weeks in Hadera. She bit into the fresh bread, nibbled the salad, and considered asking if he was ideologically opposed to salt, but decided against it.
He had a folder on his laptop that contained dozens of photos of tourist sites in Berlin. “Time to create some lies,” he told her. “I shot them all myself,” he boasted, and asked her to choose three. He said they didn’t have to be the prettiest photos, but of places she was likely to visit.
“And then you photoshop me in?” she wondered.
He grimaced, apparently finding the idea offensive. “Hell no,” he protested. “You have to know how far you can stretch a lie. For instance, the photo with your parents isn’t that great.”
“Why?” she asked, insulted. He told her he had researched her Facebook user habits and concluded she wasn’t the kind of person who posted selfies.
“I find it a little troubling that you’d know that,” she said. “That’s nothing,” he said. “Nowadays you have algorithms that can determine whether a person has cancer or is about to divorce his wife just by his expression in a photo.”
Michael said that if anything, it would have been much more like her to post the Leonard Cohen song without the photo, but reassured her it was a mistake that wouldn’t actually raise any suspicions. He suggested she wait two days and post a photo of a tourist site with a funny status, like she had done during her trip to Athens, and that toward the end of the week she upload that German DJ’s remix of the Asaf Avidan song. She couldn’t bare how painfully accurate he was, or see the point of living in a world in which her every breath was so predictable.
She took a shower and called her father to let him know everything was okay. Michael thought it might not be such a good idea, and suggested she settle for a text message, but she made it clear it wasn’t up for negotiation. She also knew there was no need to worry, because her parents never took much of an interest; the most she could expect of them was a perfunctory question like whether her hotel offered breakfast.
Her father’s voice soothed her. She thought he’d probably feel sad if he discovered she’d been close by this entire time.
Afterward, Michael took her to the café that served as his office, a five-minute walk from his apartment. He told her he sat there with his laptop a few hours every day, doing the books for a Canadian online gambling company that operated via a Gibraltar-based server. When he first moved to Hadera, he promised himself he wouldn’t go near accounting, but after his savings ran out he decided four hours a day was a sacrifice he could live with.
“I know it’s not as romantic as a video artist in Germany,” he said, “but I realized that—”
“Then where are you actually?”
“What?”
“Where are you really?” she asked, resting her hand on the table.
“What do you mean? I’m here.”
“Yeah, now. But sometimes you’re in Germany. And when you’re working, you’re in Canada or Gibraltar,” she said, struggling to put her thoughts into words.
“I’m not the only digital nomad, you know.”
“So,” she said, putting her other hand on the table too. “It doesn’t seem messed up to you? Living in a world in which the body has become, I don’t know, meaningless?”
“On the contrary,” he replied firmly. “It’s liberating.”
She didn’t like his answer. He took his laptop out of his bag and placed it on the table.
“Maybe you should spend the rest of the day on your own,” he proposed.
“What are you talking about?” she asked in a huff, and he quickly clarified that he wasn’t trying to get rid of her, putting his hand on hers in a conciliatory gesture.
“You’re welcome to stay here with me,” he said. “I just thought you came for yourself too.” He explained that these two weeks were a rare opportunity to do whatever she felt like doing. Without thinking about work or even him. “To really experience this freedom,” he said.
She reached out and gently caressed his cheek. “I was hoping you’d say that,” she lied, terrified of spending a single day in this world without a defined purpose.
She wandered the streets, feeling slightly relieved when she stumbled upon an old man playing the accordion. She dropped a twenty into his case, grateful for the opportunity to just stand there for a few moments. Then she walked into a nearby ice-cream parlor and bought a pistachio gelato. She ate it slowly, wishing to prolong the moment of defined action. She had left her phone in his apartment but didn’t want to go back, didn’t want him to think she was having a hard time being alone.
She decided to go to the beach. For the first time in years, she took the bus, and when she got there she discovered she was the only beachgoer on that winter morning.
On Saturdays during the summer months it was impossible to walk more than an inch of shore without stepping on some kid’s head, and now she had the entire place to herself. She stood in front of the water, realizing that all the years she had spent traversing the world were without ambition. She didn’t want to buy a house in Givatayim. Didn’t want to climb up the company ladder. Didn’t want to go on vacation in New York. She wasn’t sure who she had borrowed these dreams from, but knew with absolute certainty they weren’t really hers. She stretched out on the sand, her hair saturated with the tiny grains. The gray clouds sailed above her. The girl who ran away from home would have been proud of her.
On the way back, it started to rain. The two older women sitting in front of her on the bus kept exchanging glances, and she felt proud of herself.
“Where were you?” Michael shrieked when she walked into the apartment, quickly wrapping a blanket around her. “You got wet?”
He sat her at the kitchen table, served her corn soup, and told her how guilty he felt for sending her out into the world without an umbrella. She didn’t like corn but gobbled it all up.
“How was it?”
“Good,” she replied. “Really good.”
He smiled with satisfaction. “I didn’t think that after only a few hours I’d find myself like this,” he said.
“Like what?”
He blushed. “Missing you.”
She smiled. Spotting the Lonely Planet Germany travel guide on the table, she asked, “Researching ideas for new posts?” He said no. He sat down beside her and said he was starting to prepare, in the event that she decided to stay for more than two weeks. In that case, they really would have to go to Berlin together, to take more photos. “Otherwise people will start getting suspicious. And it doesn’t hurt to stock up on photos.”
“Maybe,” she said, taking a few moments to savor the idea of the two of them in a four-star hotel, sitting on the balcony gazing out at some river. If they even had a river over there.
11.
SHE BEGAN TO realize that the upkeep of a fake life took quite an effort.
They spent hours each day drawing a detailed map of all the places she visited, the dishes she ate and the shopping she did, searching for post-worthy moments. The real satisfaction came when she finally let her imagination run wild. For instance, the post she wrote about sneaking into an event thrown for the Mayor of Berlin, or the photo she uploaded of a beer bottle she had spilled over a married German man who tried to pick her up. She was pleased by the likes and comments of people who didn’t bother to conceal their jealousy, relished the thought that maybe someone was looking at her profile the way she used to look at other people’s.
They spent a considerable part of their day together, but there were moments when Michael would withdraw into himself for no apparent reason. He’d disappear from the apartment for hours at a time, or spend all morning in bed, brooding, an indecipherable look on his face.
“This isn’t easy for me,” he admitted. “Being on my own for an entire year and then suddenly spending all this time together.”
It wasn’t easy to hear, but she understood. She tried to give him space, hoping to learn how to cope with his soul’s unpredictable undercurrents. She told herself life wasn’t black and white, and that she had to learn to live with the grays. She tried to ignore the niggling thoughts. Mostly one that kept popping into her head about the small yet essential difference between her and Michael. Because despite the fact that she was enjoying the whole experience, she simply couldn’t understand how someone could live like that for an entire year. She was beginning to suspect that he wasn’t really looking to live two lives simultaneously, but only one.
“After a month it kind of gets old, doesn’t it?” she asked one evening, adding that her two weeks were almost up. He didn’t reply, but his expression read loud and clear. She realized that for Michael, existing in the real world was merely a technical glitch that kept him from living where he really wanted to.
“Don’t you understand that life is out there?” she asked. “The internet isn’t an actual substitute.”
He didn’t deny it. “I think the same way sometimes,” he said. “In the past few months I’ve been asking myself whether it’s time to get out of it. On the other hand, there are so many possibilities I haven’t even explored yet,” he said, and a twinkle flashed in his eye. He started talking about the infinite potential of online living, about the possibility of preparing in advance thousands of posts that would continue to upload years after his death. To completely free himself of the limitations of time and place.
“But why do you keep running away from what’s happening here?” she asked with frustration. “Why not live the life you want in the real world?”
He bit his lip and nodded, as if he had already asked himself the same question more than once. “Because this thing called life is made up of just two feelings,” he said. “Missing someplace you’ve never been to, and longing for someplace you’ll never be. The rest is routine. Drab routine that consumes even the most beautiful moments in life. After all, even people who build rooms in paradise have to pay income tax.”
“So what is it that you want?” she asked, and he smiled.
“To create a single, flawless space. One in which every moment is pure happiness. Facebook lets you do that. Live only the peaks and chuck out the rest, you get it?”
She froze. “Wait. The people who build rooms in paradise. What?”
He smiled. “You don’t remember?” he asked. “In the university cafeteria. A bunch of us were talking about what profession we’d choose if money was no object.”
“I remember vaguely,” she mumbled, hugging herself.
“You were the only one with a good answer. You said that when you were little, you realized not everyone wound up in the same heaven, because each person had a different notion of heaven. That as a child you imagined heaven as a big apartment building in which everyone had their own room where they realized their wildest fantasies.” She looked at him and remembered how she had imagined a man whose room was an island with coconuts, and a woman whose room was a whole city underwater.
“And then you said if that was what heaven was like, you want to be the woman who builds the rooms.”
Her heart started racing. “Strange that you’d remember,” she said.
He put his hand on her arm and stroked it with a gentleness she didn’t know he had in him. “I loved you even back then,” he said. “The rest was just for protocol.”
She didn’t think he’d be the first to confess. She drew his face to hers until their foreheads touched. She closed her eyes, and instantly knew the one thing she truly wanted. “We’ll go,” she said. “We’ll go to Berlin.”
This time it was he who hesitated. “Let’s wait a day or two, think it over,” he said, and admitted that since their last conversation he had begun to wonder whether he was in fact taking it all a step too far.
She wouldn’t let him back out. “You’ll have an entire week with me in Berlin to think it over,” she insisted.
An hour later they had already bought tickets and even booked the first night at a hotel. What few doubts he still had soon faded, and in the following days he didn’t stop talking about the trip, where they’d visit and in which restaurants they’d eat. She settled for a laconic email to her parents announcing she was extending her trip. She didn’t care about Berlin. Or about the vacation he went on and on about. She just wanted more time with him. She knew there were things between them that needed more time and closeness to grow. She just had to make sure they made it to Berlin in one piece.
One evening, while at the grocery store, she spotted from between the shelves a woman who had gone to college with them entering the shop with a stroller. She quickly pushed Michael’s head into a cucumber display. They kept perfectly still for a few good minutes, hiding between the tomatoes and sweet potatoes, looking at each other with that secret smile of theirs. Once the woman and her baby left the store, she sighed with relief, thinking that maybe it actually was possible to live an entire life like this.
12.
HER MOTHER CALLED two days before the flight, in the middle of the night. She didn’t hear the phone ring. When she woke up to go to the bathroom, she happened to see the text message.
“I took Dad to the hospital. Chest pain.”
Tamara dialed her mother’s number in a panic. She called again and again until her mother sent her another text saying they were in the examination room and she’d call her later.
“I’m coming,” Tamara wrote her, to which her mother replied that it was a shame to cut her trip short especially for them, and promised to update her when they knew more. Without reading the rest of the message, Tamara started picking up the clothes scattered around the apartment. Michael woke up and found her sitting on the floor, trying to stuff another sweater into her bag.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She pointed at her phone and he read the texts, sat down beside her, and wrapped his arms around her in a tight embrace.
“Just don’t forget you’re still in Germany,” he said while stroking her hair. “I’ll find you the earliest flight. You’ll be there by tomorrow afternoon. Maybe even before.”
Her body recoiled from him. She leaned back and considered him, certain he was joking.
“Did you really just say that?” she asked, furious at his tormented expression, as if he had hijacked her pain.
“How are you going to explain to your mother that it only took you an hour to get to Ichilov?” he said. “I know it’s a tough situation, but we have to think straight.”
She pushed him off her, then picked up the shirt he was sitting on.
“The last thing I care about right now is your fucking Germany,” she yelled, and the more she thought about what he had said, the more absurd it seemed. “Never in my life have I thought a person could be so detached.” She got up and started pacing the room.
“You knew what you were getting into,” he mumbled. “It could burn me too, don’t you get it?”
She wanted to kill him. “What’s wrong with you?” she screamed at him. “Don’t you understand my father is dying?”
He didn’t answer, and she had nothing more to say. She looked at him again, saw him withdrawing into himself, fixing his eyes on the floor, and couldn’t understand what she was still doing there.
“I’ll call you a taxi,” he said without looking at her. He tried to dial, but his hand was shaking badly.
“No need,” she announced and started walking toward the door. Slowly.
“I hope you come back.”
Once outside the apartment she called a taxi herself. Waiting for its arrival, she got another text from her mother: “Gallstones. He’ll be fine. Sorry for making you worry. Good night, have fun.”
She slunk back into the apartment. Michael was sitting on the couch, breathing heavily. She poured herself a glass of water and sat down beside him.
“He’s fine,” she said.
“Glad to hear,” he replied quietly, without looking at her. “You’re right. I’ve gone too far.”
She patted his head gently. Said she was the one who’d gone too far.
He didn’t reply.
“I hope you don’t regret that we met,” she said, revealing the fear that had been building up inside her those last few days.
He looked up, his eyes red. She gazed at him, at his hands that were shaking.
“Us meeting,” he said. “It wasn’t a coincidence.”
He admitted he had stalked her on Facebook. Orchestrated a chance encounter the moment he saw she checked “attending” for that conference and realized she’d be in Hadera. He confessed he had no idea what would come of it, but decided he didn’t want to let such an opportunity slip by.
She placed her glass on the table. “Surprising,” she said.
“That I stalked you?”
“That I didn’t figure it out myself.” She looked him in the eye. “But why me?”
“Because of the rooms in heaven,” he said.
She didn’t buy it. “Why me?” she insisted.
“Because I was alone,” he mumbled and added that she had been right from the start. That it had all gone too far. That he had completely lost himself this past year. “I have to get out of here,” he said.
“Wait,” she replied. “Let’s fly to Berlin and decide there.”
He didn’t say a word.
13.
THE EVENING BEFORE the flight, she found him sitting by the bed, packing his clothes. Then he announced he was going to buy a book for the flight, kissed her on the cheek, and left the apartment. She lay on the bed and closed her eyes. She felt a heaviness settling inside her.
When she woke up it was already night. Tamara reached out for her phone, checked if there were any new WhatsApp messages, and logged into Facebook. She wanted to see how many likes she had received for the most recent photo she had uploaded. The fourth post that appeared in her feed was Michael’s. He had uploaded it thirty minutes ago.
There’s no place like home
Back in Israel in a few hours.
An airplane emoji appeared next to the text, and according to his check-in, he was “en route to Israel.”
She got out of bed and went into the kitchen. As she had suspected, Michael was sitting at the table in his familiar black jacket, a small suitcase at his feet. He looked at her quietly, as if he had been waiting for her.
“An English gentleman about to board his carriage,” she said.
He smiled. “I’m sorry. I can’t stay here anymore.”
“You couldn’t wait a week?”
“I’m an impulsive guy.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” she replied in a sarcastic tone, afraid she was going to burst into tears. She pulled up a chair and sat down in front of him. She kept looking at him, how different he was from the insecure guy who had sat across from her at the restaurant.
“The apartment’s paid for till the end of the month,” he said, and told her he thought she’d be better off going to Germany. “It’ll make it easier to describe where you’ve been. It’s not the same without being there in person.”
She didn’t see the point trying to convince him to stay. She had come to terms with it quicker than she had expected.
“Were you happy with me?” she asked.
He smiled again.
“Yes,” he said. “Reality didn’t have the chance to mess that up yet.”
“Life isn’t black and white. You have to learn to live with the grays too,” she told him.
“True,” he said and got up. For a moment he seemed to be considering whether to hug her, and eventually decided he should. She got up but didn’t hug him back.
“But I can’t,” he said. “I’d rather have you without all the grays.”
His words were physically painful.
He turned around and walked out. She sat down in his chair, listening to the sound of his suitcase being dragged down the stairs.
14.
THERE WAS NO river view. No balcony either. But the hotel room was comfortable and cozy, and the people were as nice as he had said they were. She hadn’t actually planned on checking, but her phone automatically connected to the hotel Wi-Fi, and he had just uploaded a few photos from his homecoming party. She looked at the people surrounding him, didn’t recognize any of them. A bespectacled girl sat next to him for the entire party. She clicked on her profile but couldn’t find any information about her.
She lay on the bed. In a moment of desperation, she shared Amir Lev’s song about Holden’s ducks. She wasn’t sure what she meant to say by it. But maybe that was why she felt it was the most real thing she had ever posted in the virtual world.