by Iddo Gefen
* * *
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.