Jerusalem Beach

by Iddo Gefen

  1.

  NELLY WAS THE first to pick up on it. One night, after Shira had fallen asleep, she whispered to me in the kitchen that something was going on with our little girl. Something bad. Not just your everyday blues. Something in her eyes had changed since we moved south. “I’m not speaking metaphorically,” she stressed. “There’s something in their grayness that doesn’t look right. I don’t know.”

  Nelly believed in the body, believed it spoke louder than words. She claimed that’s how she could almost always tell when something was about to happen to Shira. I thought there was a simpler explanation. That she always suspected something was going on with our daughter, so sometimes she also happened to be right. I’m not saying this as criticism. Quite the opposite. Nelly was the better parent. Neither of us doubted that. When Shira was five, even she noted in a passing remark made on Tel Baruch beach that “Mommy loves me more.” Nelly quickly denied it, signaled to me to go get the girl an ice cream, and like an idiot I ran a kilometer and a half for a cracked Cornetto, only to run back and discover that a week earlier, Shira had sworn off dairy because her kindergarten teacher said milk was stolen from cows. I don’t know whether Nelly forgot to warn me, or if she just wanted to remind me of the power dynamic. I, for my part, tried to come out ahead at least in the more banal areas—parent-teacher conferences, school plays, and sports competitions—where I enjoyed a slight lead. This included the fourth-grade soccer league’s final match of the season, when ASA Ramat Aviv beat Beitar Kfar Shalem two to one thanks to Shira blocking a last-minute penalty kick.

  A brief hug at the end of the game. That’s all I managed to get from her.

  “The girl’s doing fine,” I announced. I told Nelly that I had actually been worried the first two weeks, when she acted as if nothing had changed. No sane girl moves from Tel Aviv to a desert homestead without having some kind of temporary crisis, and it’s good for her to finally experience it.

  Nelly said I was missing the point and lowered the jar of herbal tea onto the table with a thud. Other than her clothes, it was the only thing she brought with her from our old house, claiming that without it she would go back to smoking in two days. I wasn’t as successful at asceticism; I set out south with two bookcases, a telescope, and my framed certificate of excellence from the Technion, which I still haven’t found the time to hang. It was the one condition I made when Nelly insisted we move, to take whatever I wanted with me, and to her credit she never gave me any trouble over it.

  “It’s a little more serious than that, Ofer,” she said, adding my name to convey the gravity of the matter.

  “You’re just getting yourself worked up for no reason,” I threw in before she could say anything else. “Give it a couple of weeks, the girl will get used to it.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to explain, I don’t think it’s just the move,” she said, and added in a confiding tone, “Maybe you could talk to her? I’ve tried but it’s not working.”

  I wanted to say that I’d tried as well, that I’d been trying for some time now and getting nowhere. And that also, I’d lately come to realize that Shira had always belonged more to her than to me. That maybe it was time we considered having another kid. And that we would agree that I get dibs on this one. We’d sign an agreement before he’s even born, two kids for two parents. But I didn’t really want to bring up the subject, to deal with her adamant assertion that it was all in my head, and her not-so-subtle insinuations that even if it wasn’t, a father doesn’t talk about his child like that.

  “Sure thing,” I replied, got up, and went to our bedroom. “I’ll talk to her.”

  2.

  I WOKE UP to an empty room. Nelly had left for work early and dropped off Shira at school on her way. She was supposed to start work every day at nine, but insisted on being at the office at eight. To set an example. “To help these people realize their potential, because potential is not something they’re short of here in the south,” she’d repeat her worn mantra, as if the people of the south were another moisturizer she had taken upon herself to market to the masses. I have to admit I was skeptical at first. When out of nowhere Nelly suggested we move to a remote farm in the south, I didn’t buy her sudden Zionist urge to settle and develop the Negev. But after two months here, I’m not so sure anymore. You never know with Nelly. Most of the time she can’t stand the world, but every so often she gets these bursts of compassion, which she herself can’t explain. She once called me from the car, and sounding rather distraught said she had picked up a homeless Russian she found on the street. She ordered me to switch on the water heater and clear my wet clothes from the bathroom. Only after I said that if Shira caught AIDS it was on her did she come to her senses, dropping the guy off on the Namir highway with two hundred shekels in his pocket.

  And yet, Nelly wasn’t one to move to the south out of purely altruistic motives. It’s tempting to believe we moved because she wanted the promotion, but that wasn’t the only reason either. Even though we never discuss it, I know we moved because of me. Because I didn’t deliver. Didn’t make good on the promise I made on our first date in that dive bar in downtown Haifa.

  During our twelve years of marriage, how many times have we discussed that promise? Three? Four? Hard to say exactly. But I do remember what she told me a few months after that first date, when we went on our first vacation together—a bed-and-breakfast in the Galilee. She lay on the bed in a white bathrobe, half naked, ran her fingers through my hair and said that was what had won her over. The promise that by forty, I’d make my first million. She explained it wasn’t my desire to get rich that attracted her. It wasn’t the money, it was the drive. It was how I said it—not as an aspiration, but a cold fact. “That’s what makes you so special,” she said, and quickly added, “makes us special. The drive to push forward. To succeed unapologetically.”

  I immediately told her she couldn’t be more right. And not because I actually knew she was right like I was hoping she was. I don’t know whether I was truly planning on making a million bucks, or just wanted to impress a girl. But with time, I found out I liked playing the guy she wanted me to be. The one who goes once a week to a fusion restaurant without knowing what fusion cuisine means; who surprises his girlfriend with a trip to London on a Wednesday morning for no special reason, just because he feels like it. Nelly says a man is measured by his most ambitious dream, and mine started the day I met her.

  There was only one problem with our dreams—she realized them, and I didn’t. She beat me four years ago, whizzed past me leaving a trail of dust when she was appointed VP at Segal & Zuzovsky, while I was still stuck in career limbo as a development manager in a series of mediocre start-ups whose idea of a company fun day was an egg-and-spoon race at the Yarkon Park. At first she teased me that I couldn’t keep up. But with time the banter died down and was replaced by tedious exchanges such as whose turn it was to take out the trash and which form to fetch from the bank. Petty requests that only reinforced my fear that all the expectations she had of me at the beginning had disappeared along the way, as if she had resigned to spending her life with a lesser man.

  * * *

  I honestly thought the start-up I had joined two years ago, Lucid Memo, was going to change everything. The whole business was based on a Jewish professor of neuroscience from Harvard who immigrated to Israel after reading the book Start-up Nation. She moved here and hooked up with an Israeli hi-tech entrepreneur, some guy called Amichai Miner; they decided to devise a technology that would enable people to share memories. Today I can’t believe I thought it stood a chance; I guess I just didn’t think it through at the time. I even gave up part of my salary in exchange for options in the company. All I wanted was to make good on my promise. To score a knockout against life itself. I worked my ass off, anywhere between fourteen and sixteen hours a day, including weekends. Including holidays. More than I wanted the money, I wanted to get to the moment I could tell Nelly I made an exit, that the company was sold to
some Chinese investment fund. To see how she would smile despite herself, exposing that small gap between her two front teeth she always tried to hide.

  But that didn’t happen. Development stalled and the money started to run out. I was forced to recruit mediocre talent because we couldn’t compete with the salaries other companies were offering. Six months later I was fired from my position as head of development, and one of those unremarkable employees took over my role for half the pay. His name was Nicolai, a strange bird who had graduated from college only three years ago; one of those people who thinks that anyone who doesn’t vacation abroad at least once a year is living below the poverty line. He still calls me once a month to bitch about his problems at work, failing to comprehend that I have no interest in helping him, even though I’ve been laying on pretty thick hints about it.

  Anyway, instead of celebrating my fortieth birthday on a yacht bound for the Canary Islands like we’ve always talked about, Nelly and I settled for Eyal Shani’s new joint. Rockstar Shlomi Shaban and his actress wife, Yuval Scharf, sat at the table to our right. It was there, shortly before our dessert arrived—chocolate cake sprinkled with sea salt—that Nelly brought up the idea of moving south. “For half a year tops.” She said Zuzovsky had asked her to set up the new offices in Mitzpe Ramon. She talked about the unexploited potential of the residents of the Negev. She said that if she did a good job, she’d climb another rung on the ladder to CEO. And that the timing couldn’t be better because her parents would be staying in LA for at least another year, so we could live on their farm on Highway 40, a fifteen-minute drive to Mitzpe. Then she launched into a ten-minute monologue about why living at the end of the earth was actually a good thing. That the clean air would do wonders for Shira’s asthma. That we always said we wanted to check the living-outside-a-major-city box. And besides, it would be significantly cheaper living on the farm because her parents were even paying the electricity and water, so instead of looking for a new job I could work on developing that app I’d been talking about for over a year now. And what she really wanted to say but chose not to was that it had been two months since I’d been let go and I still hadn’t gotten off the couch. That if I wanted to continue being unemployed and depressed, at least I could do it in rent-free shitsville.

  * * *

  I didn’t actually need much convincing. Back then, all I wanted was to take a breather. To stop for a moment and figure out what my next step should be after failing to accomplish my one goal.

  “No chance,” I replied. I argued the move wouldn’t be good for Shira. That I couldn’t see myself living outside Tel Aviv. I was afraid of telling Nelly the truth because I had the feeling she might be testing me. That she was thinking of leaving me and checking where I stood. So I said there was nothing to talk about, and only after two weeks, when I realized she was serious, did I say I’d do it, just for her.

  Shira was psyched about the idea, said living in the desert sounded like a dream. She thought and talked about the world in Disney terms, and meeting her expectations wasn’t always easy. She once declared hysterically that she had to find the star closest to the sun otherwise she’d die, forcing Nelly to take her to the observatory in Givatayim that very same evening. When she was eight, she reached the conclusion that she was a secret princess and we were her adoptive parents, thinking the word “adoptive” meant evil. Her first attempt to run away from home soon followed. We found her seven minutes after she walked out the front door, fifty meters from our building. She told us she hadn’t dared go any farther because she knew she wasn’t allowed to cross the street alone.

  We didn’t always know how to handle that distant dreaminess of hers, and she certainly didn’t know how to handle our sarcasm. She kept saying she’d never be like us when she grew up. On her most recent birthday, when she turned eleven, she even tried hiding the Encyclopedia of Fairies she got from her friend, fearing we’d tell her fairies weren’t real.

  Nelly worried Shira wouldn’t fit in at the school in Mitzpe. She claimed that if Shira couldn’t even handle us, she wouldn’t stand a chance with the children there. They’d eat her alive. I was also afraid the hooligans of Mitzpe would crush her delicate soul, but I thought it was a good opportunity to force her out of her little bubble. Luckily, she landed a good teacher, who even assigned her a “big brother,” a year ahead of her. When Shira got home from her first day at her new school, we were on the edge of our seats as if she was returning from the front lines and had lived to tell the tale. Straight off the bat she said we had lied to her, that the kids in Mitzpe listened to exactly the same music as the kids in Tel Aviv, and we both laughed with relief.

  * * *

  Unlike for Shira and Nelly, no one was waiting for me in the south. To be honest, it was a comforting realization. I thought that at first I’d spend most of my time herding sheep, connecting to nature or something like that. But after two days I realized that Nabil, the Bedouin worker who tended to the farm, did everything much better than I ever could. I only got in his way with my silly questions. So after a week of dragging my feet, I decided Nelly was right, that it actually was a good opportunity to start working on my app. I had gotten the idea for it when I was still working for the last start-up; one of the employees at the office had said his dream was to buy a Ferrari, but he had no idea how to even start saving up for it. It got me thinking there could be an app that helped people realize their dreams. You’d type in the thing you wanted most—a Ferrari, a house in Petah Tikva, a monthlong trip to Japan—and the software would calculate your odds of fulfilling that dream based on data such as the price, your salary, and current expenses. And not only would it evaluate the odds, it would also provide an estimated time frame and suggest the necessary steps toward getting that Jet Ski you had always wanted. It would recommend small changes to your spending habits, such as canceling your gym membership that was just a waste of money, or skipping a vacation in Greece. Every so often, the app would even recommend more significant life changes. For example, weighing the possibility of quitting your job as a high school teacher against cashing in on your charisma as a real estate agent. Because values are nice, but then you have only a 4 percent chance of being the proud owner of a Ferrari.

  I started spending a few hours a day working on my idea, running market research to see if a similar product already existed, making phone calls to people who could help me get started, trying to write a rudimentary code for the software. I can’t say exactly what I did, but I can say it took up most of my time. When I think back on that period, it feels like a faded, dragged-out dream devoid of clear actions. The only thing I remember clearly is that other than working on the app, once a day, a little before sunset, I’d climb up the hill behind the farm and look at the lights coming on across the Mitzpe below.

  The official name was “Tel Ahmar”—the Red Hill. But it wasn’t really red, just a sandy hill in faded shades of brown. And it wasn’t even a hill but a cliff someone had probably fallen off once. No one sets out to visit Tel Ahmar. Most people stumble upon it on their way to Eilat. They climb up the hill and come back sweaty and tired, asking me where the red sand was, to which I reply with the same tired joke that it just ran out an hour ago.

  3.

  THE DAY AFTER my conversation with Nelly, Shira came home in the afternoon like always. She shut the door behind her, holding a small hoop with colorful threads and beads.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “An Indian dream catcher,” she replied. I asked who gave it to her, and she said her big brother.

  “Nice of him,” I said. “Sounds like he likes you.”

  She blushed, but didn’t answer. Didn’t even smile. I immediately wanted to change the subject, feeling bad for embarrassing her. I asked if she wanted me to make her something to eat. She said she didn’t, which was a relief because there wasn’t enough food in the fridge to whip up something nice. I knew I had to talk to her, but didn’t know how to begin, and before I could find a
way she was already in her room. I stood by her closed door for several moments, then reached out to knock, but the fear that she wouldn’t open got the better of me.

  I had already come up with the alibi I’d give Nelly, that I hadn’t talked to Shira yet because I had to help Nabil tend to an injured sheep. But luckily, I didn’t have to lie. Nelly had had a long day at the office and only came back to the B&B around midnight. That’s what Nelly and I called the place we lived in, simply because we were unable to call it home. Nelly collapsed onto the mattress without brushing her teeth. Her parents were short, thin people who made do with a narrow double bed. Like every night, we embarked on a long session of awkward fumbling and shoving in an attempt to find a semi-comfortable sleeping position. And I, even though I never told her, liked the small shoves that sometimes turned into brief caresses, intimations of the obscure distance between us.

  * * *

  In hindsight I can say the dream catcher was the first sign, but as with the others that followed, I failed to take notice. That bus she missed, the bleary eyes, that morning I woke her up and for a moment she didn’t recognize me. A litany of supposedly random events that only revealed their full meaning with time.

  4.

  “A TIP FOR LIFE.” That was the headline of the newspaper article I had been reading the day it all began. It was about a waitress in the States who received a ten-thousand-dollar check from an old customer, who then killed himself by jumping off a bridge and into the Mississippi River. I hope that before I die someone will solve the mystery of why our minds remember such useless information. Every evening I’d wait for Nelly to bring a copy of Yedioth Ahronoth from Mitzpe. I used to wrap it in a blue plastic bag and put it on the table, saving it for the next morning. Nelly reminded me that I was already reading it after everyone else and didn’t see the point of putting it off even longer, but I had started to like the idea of living in a different time zone from the rest of the world, a day after everyone else. I liked thinking that when time took a right onto the dirt trail by Highway 40, it came for a little R&R. That here it stopped moving forward at a steady pace, knowing that it was allowed to slow down, even move a few minutes backward, sag, or spill sideways.