by Eshkol Nevo
After the sixth tequila, in a bar where all the patrons look like extras hired for a bar scene, you pay the bartender and begin walking to your hotel. You remember that when you were a kid in the fourth or fifth grade, your social life improved miraculously in only a few months. In the time between Hanukkah and Passover, you went from being shut out to being sought out, and the shift was so sharp that you suspected your parents had set it up. That they had bribed everyone, boys and girls, so they would be nice to you. For an entire year, you walked around with that suspicion, looking for signs to reinforce it. And now, thirty years later, you’re right back there.
You want to call home. Speak to your wife. Hear a familiar voice. Grab on to something before you finally lose your balance. But the time difference. And the expense. Besides, whenever you’ve called her from abroad recently, she hasn’t answered, and if she has, there was no indication in her voice that she missed you. And there are other signs: She stifles yawns when you insist on foreplay, she doesn’t notice your haircut, when you tell her about an argument you’ve had with someone, she automatically takes his side. But of all those signs, which have become more numerous this year, her I-don’t-really-miss-you voice on the phone is the most upsetting.
So you don’t call home, to avoid feeling hurt, but the next day you have no choice, and in order to be sure you exist, you come on to a Colombian journalist who looks like Gabriela Sabatini, the tennis player. You flirt with her during the interview and ask for her e-mail address so you can send her some poems by Yehuda Amichai in Spanish translation. You send her the poems along with an invitation for dinner, but there’s still a cloud hanging over the meal: Maybe she’s an extra too? But when you kiss, the cloud disperses. She kisses hard and well, and you hail a taxi and go to your hotel. You walk past dozens of Japanese in that lobby, and you feel as if you exist. You fuck, and suddenly, you don’t care whether people abroad read your book or not. Later, she looks for her large earrings, which she took off before she undressed. She wants to go, but you touch her arm and ask her not to leave you, and all night, you sing Shlomo Artzi songs in Hebrew into her ear and fuck her. You fuck her and sing Shlomo Artzi songs. Over and over again. She’s divorced with a kid, and in the town she comes from, everyone knows everything about everyone, so she hasn’t been with a man for two years to keep them from gossiping about her in the local churrascaria, and she has a poem by Cavafy tattooed on her lower back, right near her buttocks, not “Ithaka,” something less well known. She doesn’t write fiction, only poems, and not for publication, and every time she comes, it sounds as if she’s having a serious asthma attack and might die.
She puts the large earrings on in the morning and goes off to interview other writers who have come to the festival, and you fly back to Israel.
You arrive in the middle of the night, carry your suitcase up the stairs to your apartment, and feel like Odysseus returning to Ithaca. Your wife is sleeping, buried deeply in the blanket, and you wake her with a kiss and tell her everything. There has always been complete honesty between you, and after you started becoming a professional liar, it became stronger, the need for one person to whom you can tell the truth and only the truth. But it’s not just that. You want her to truly wake up. To open her eyes.
The more you tell her, the straighter she sits up in bed. Shoves another pillow under her head. Moves from lying down to a full sitting position. Her eyes open wide. She can’t find words.
Talk to me, Diki, you plead. Say something.
She shakes her head. Slowly. Her eyes are shining.
I was lonely, you say, I was very, very lonely.
Lonely? she asks. There is disgust in her voice, but you ignore the caution sign and continue—
I wasn’t lonely just in Colombia, but before then too.
What are you saying, she says, and now her tone is blatantly sarcastic. Distant.
You try to take her hand. To keep her from dropping away from you.
Don’t touch me, she says. And says, I was lonely too. And says, But it didn’t make me sleep with someone else.
After the last sentence, she stands up, her long hair tangled, brown snakes climbing over each other, one hand clenched into a fist, the other spread like a STOP sign on the road.
She asks you to leave the house.
She doesn’t care that it’s the middle of the night. Or that the neighbors can hear you begging for your life. Since the dysthymia, it’s been impossible to live with you anyway, she says, she’s been close to the edge because of all your trips, and Colombia—Colombia is just the last straw as far as she’s concerned. She pushes you out, actually puts her hands on your chest and pushes you out, and you stand outside your front door at five thirty in the morning, one foot on the morning newspaper, the other on the doormat, and you don’t know where to go. The last time something like this happened to you, you found shelter at your grandmother’s place. But she’s dead. Until a year ago, you could drive to Ari’s, because you had an unwritten agreement that, no matter what, you would always be there for each other. But Ari is dying in the hospital now. And they’re very strict there when it comes to visiting hours. Anyway, this isn’t the right time to dump this whole story on him. So you get on your bicycle and pedal to the studio. You’re no longer a partner in it, you left a few weeks ago because you couldn’t write even a short story there, but you remember that the lock on one of the windows is broken. When you arrive, you open that window, climb inside, and go to sleep on the psychologist’s yoga mat. In your clothes. Without a blanket.
In the morning, you buy toothpaste and a toothbrush in the grocery store, brush in the sink that’s in the coffee corner and wash your feet in the same sink. While you’re lowering your feet back onto the floor, your lower back goes out again, so you hobble to the yoga mat and lie down.
At nine in the morning, there’s a knock on the door.
You’re still on the mat. And you can’t get up to open it.
You shout, “Come in!”
A messenger enters and hands you an envelope.
You sign for it, lying down, to confirm that you’ve received it.
The messenger looks at you and says, I don’t believe it!
On second glance, you recognize him. A few years ago, he was in your workshop. And he was pretty talented too. He wrote an inflammatory story about euthanasia, about someone known as “the Angel” who went from hospital to hospital in Israel between two and four in the morning to help people die. You remember that this student standing in front of you now used to go out to smoke during breaks, and at the tenth and last meeting, he raised his hand and said defiantly: We’ve talked about a lot of things in this workshop, but we’ve ignored the most important question—why write at all?
Now he asks, Does your back hurt?
Along with other things, you say.
He suggests you phone a house-call doctor to give you an epidural.
You say, I’ve taken enough painkillers.
He says, Okay, but why suffer?
You promise to consider it.
After he leaves, you open the envelope, find the forms, and read them. Several seconds pass before you understand that you’re reading divorce papers.
The director asks the cameraman to do a close-up of you.
You don’t see a director. Or a cameraman. But suspect they’re there. Part of the convoluted scheme, the big, ingenious translation scam.
You think about your kids, who still don’t know—
And start to cry.
For the camera.
And then it slowly turns into real weeping.
Does the line between truth and lies sometimes become blurred for you?
They took us for a polygraph test, all the cadets in the course for field security officers, they wanted us to learn about it up close, understand how it works. They put a small group of us, along with our commanders, into
a room that contained a lot of instruments and a bearded researcher in civilian clothes. The bearded researcher asked for a volunteer to demonstrate. Without too much thought, I raised my hand. Just to stand out. He sat me on a chair and connected a few tubes and wires to my stomach and arms. Then he said, I’ll ask you several technical questions. He asked my name, my age, and my address. I answered succinctly, and then suddenly he asked me whether I’d ever used drugs. I said no. Without blinking an eye. The researcher didn’t blink either, and continued to ask me more questions that I don’t remember anymore. At the end, he thanked me, asked everyone to approach his Formica table, and explained how to read the graph. My heart was pounding and drops of sweat rolled down from the back of my neck along the length of my spine. The researcher said, Our volunteer spoke the truth all the way through, and he showed us how the various measurements the polygraph had recorded indicated that the responses of my body, even if there were big jumps in the lines, were still within the normal range. Later there were some questions, I think, and then we left the room and another group entered. We went to the canteen to wait until the bus took us back to the base. I bought a Coke, I remember, and when I opened it, the gas burst out all at once and sprayed everyone standing next to me.
For years, I hoped I’d accidentally bump into that bearded researcher again, on the train, on the street, in my family doctor’s waiting room, and ask him what really happened there: Did I manage to fool the polygraph machine? Or for some reason, did he decide to lie and save me from being thrown out of the course? But time is going by and the image of him is getting so fuzzy in my memory that sometimes I suspect I might have made up the whole story.
When you start writing, do you know how the story will end?
No, but I know how I will end. I always knew that the men in my family die young. Based on the family average, I’ll have my first heart attack in two years. It’s all about genes. But recently, since Ari got sick, it’s been having a real effect on me. The feeling I had in my twenties and thirties that nothing’s urgent has now become a feeling that everything’s urgent. Among other things, the crucial question of whether I want to spend what’s left of my life on earth writing. Whether finishing another book is the most important thing to do before the chest pains begin. Maybe, instead, I want to spend more time with Dikla and the kids? Maybe I want to go into politics? For a short time, is what I mean. Until the heart attack. Or live in Australia for a year or two? Or travel around the world looking more seriously for my childhood friend who disappeared on me after the army, and then have the attack knowing that, at least, I did what I could to find him?
I usually begin to see the end of my books—the way you see land from a sinking ship—close to the end.
I keep on swimming a while longer in the sea of infinite possibilities. Then I emerge from it in sorrow and relief.
How do you choose the names of your characters?
Ari’s mother came to take her shift at his bedside.
Usually, we exchange only a few words in Spanish and I leave. But there was something in the way she came into the room. The way she walked, heavier, wearier than usual, made me decide to stay a while longer. I didn’t have a home to go back to anyway. Just a yoga mat. So I offered her my chair and dragged one in from another room.
Ari was sleeping. From the way he was breathing, it was a deep sleep.
I brought a few empanadas, she said, taking a plastic container out of her bag.
She looked a bit like Mercedes Sosa. That thought flashed through my mind every time we met. Something Indian in her eyes. And, in fact, in her son’s eyes as well.
Gracias, I said, and took one.
Your friend, he’s very strong.
I know.
Finalmente, he will conquer this disease.
What are the chances, I didn’t say.
When he was two—she said, and stopped.
I looked at her. She was silent. I took another empanada.
He was…very naughty, your friend, she began again. We ran around the house after him to keep him from breaking things.
That sounds just like him.
When he was only a year old, he refused to take his afternoon nap. All the children in preschool went into the room with the small mattresses and went to sleep, and he would drive the teachers crazy. But they loved him. Because he did everything with that smile of his.
I can picture that.
And one evening—she said and closed the box of empanadas—I was in the kitchen. Marcello, my husband, was at work. I usually picked up the pieces of Lego after Ari finished playing, but I forgot. It just happened. I forgot. I was with him all afternoon and I was tired. He didn’t tell you this story?
No.
All of a sudden, all I heard was silence. I was in the kitchen and I heard a bad silence coming from the living room. I ran there. He’d swallowed a Lego piece.
Uh-oh.
A big piece. Four quarters.
Oh no.
I tried to get it out, I slapped his back. It didn’t come out. I called an ambulance. Meanwhile, he didn’t have any air. He couldn’t even cry because he had no air. The ambulance came fast. On the way to the hospital, he actually died. Muerte clínica. How do you say that in Hebrew? He was clinically dead? But in intensive care, they brought him back. And he was like that for a few days, between life and death.
Wow.
Then we changed his name to Ari.
What do you mean, changed it?
He never told you he had another name?
No.
Bueno, maybe he forgot.
What was his other name?
Enrico. That was the name of Marcello’s brother, he was one of the desaparecidos, the ones that the junta disappeared.
I didn’t know that—
You see, Marcello, instead of blaming me for being so stupid to leave the boy alone with the Lego, the way any man would, he blamed himself for giving him a bad name, an unlucky name.
Why unlucky?
You heard about the Madres de Plaza de Maya?
Yes, of course.
So Marcello’s mother was one of them. Her son Enrico, Marcello’s brother, went to work at the printing house one morning and never came back. She demonstrated with the mothers in the plaza every Thursday until the junta fell. But even after the junta fell, the government didn’t give any information about Enrico.
Bastards.
They say some of the disappeared were thrown out of airplanes.
Really?
And that’s why Marcello came to Israel. He didn’t want to stay there anymore.
What a story.
And the doctor in the hospital said, Your son fought like a lion, an ari. He fought like an ari for his life. So Marcello went to the Ministry of the Interior and changed his name to Ari.
And it helped?
Only God knows. And I don’t believe in God at all. But yes, Ari opened his eyes and started breathing again, and the doctor said—I will never forget his words—“The deciding factor in cases like this isn’t only the death force but also the life-force. And your son has a very strong life-force.”
That’s true.
And that’s why I tell you that he will win this time too.
I hope so.
You really didn’t know anything about this whole story?
Not a thing.
Okay, you know what they say—you learn something new every day.
That’s right.
Now you can go, you were a good friend long enough today.
Don’t be silly, Mrs.—
Carmela—
Carmela.
And take the empanadas with you. You look hungry. Everything is okay with you, corazón?
* * *
—
My characters’ names are inspired by people close t
o me, to commemorate them or to get my juices flowing. But sometimes the fate of the character changes as the story moves forward, so there’s a burning need for a different name.
If you could invite three writers, dead or alive, for dinner, who would they be?
If we’re already talking about a dream dinner, I wouldn’t waste it on colleagues.
Writers, dead or alive, tend to be focused on themselves in a way that turns them into the most frustrating conversation partners. Furthermore, there’s always a suspicion that an intimate anecdote you relate at a dinner with writers will become raw material for any one of them. After all, most of the supposedly biographical details in this interview are supposedly taken from a conversation I had two years ago with a supposedly Scandinavian writer in a Jerusalem restaurant. Supposedly. Axel Wolff’s thrillers were phenomenally successful all over the world, but nonetheless his shoulders were stooped, his eyes dull, and his blond hair lackluster. I asked him a lot of questions in an empathetic tone, trying to understand how he could possibly be so popular everywhere and not be happy about it. That’s how I learned, among other things, that what happens in Colombia doesn’t always stay in Colombia, that a girl can break her father’s heart, and that the dysthymia makes you feel as if your body is covered by a layer of ice: Tiny fish of happiness swim beneath it, but you can’t reach them because the ice is so rock-solid that you can never break through it.
In any case, I would invite three childhood friends to that dinner. We’ve been friends since high school, but lately, we haven’t had a chance to see each other. We made too many children. We took on too many mortgages. And Ari is hospitalized in Tel Hashomer.