by Eshkol Nevo
Then I told her that I write. Sometimes.
And she said those words, that she had always dreamed of marrying a writer, adding a flirtatious smile, the first flirtatious smile. She leaned slightly toward me, revealing her spectacular collarbone.
* * *
—
After we slept together, we lay beside each other in bed.
I remember that I said: Wow
And that she said: Wow.
I remember that I stroked her and said: You have a dancer’s body.
The truth is, she said, that I danced in the Ma’alot Hora group. And she giggled. They thought I’d turn out to be something.
And…you didn’t? I asked gently.
I didn’t pass the academy tests, she said. Truthfully, it was pretty humiliating.
I waited silently for the story, which did not come.
I still didn’t know that that’s what I’d always get, it was all her pride would allow: quick glances into the wounded area. And there would be something terribly frustrating and, at the same time, seductive about that.
* * *
—
I was twenty-four that night, an age when it’s still possible to have new dreams.
I can’t say that I became a writer to win Dikla’s heart, but I can assume that with another, less stimulating woman, I wouldn’t be writing.
When I left on a trek to South America a few months after we met, she was in the middle of the academic year, and she wasn’t the type to change plans for anyone.
One of us suggested that maybe we should see other people while I was away.
The same one, waiting in Amsterdam for his connecting flight, changed a bill for some coins to drop into the pay phone, and said, I take it back, I don’t want to lose you, you’re the love of my life, it doesn’t matter how long this trip takes, I’m yours. Yours alone.
I kept my word.
I wrote her long letters while I was away. Very long. Dozens of crowded pages. There were days when that was all I did: write to her. Ari showed exemplary patience. I remember a particular roof in a town called Tumbes in Peru that had straw chairs and a footstool on it, along with an ugly view of buildings. I didn’t come down from that roof for two days, and every time Ari came up to ask what was going on with me and when were we finally going to move on to another place, I said, Just a sec, bro, I’m in the middle of a letter.
In fact, everything I’ve written since then, eight books, is one very long letter addressed to her.
I never let anyone else get as close to me as she did. Her name alone engulfed me with softness.
I can’t fall asleep without her, wake up without her, fall without her, find my way in the hall of mirrors without her.
In the end, I’ll probably show her this interview too.
* * *
—
She called me after I’d been sleeping in the studio for two weeks.
Said the kids missed me.
That she doesn’t know what to tell them.
That she’s sick and tired of having to take care of everything herself.
I said, Does that mean I can come back?
Yes, she replied, but—
I said, I’d like to remind you that all the men in my family die young.
And she didn’t play her part and laugh.
We haven’t slept together since then. After the kids fall asleep, I go to the couch in the living room, and before they wake up, I fold the sheet and blanket, drink a cup of Turkish coffee, and make their sandwiches: cream cheese for Yanai, cream cheese and olives for Noam. I also make a third sandwich, with cream cheese, olives, and cherry tomatoes—for Shira. Then I remember that she doesn’t live at home anymore. So I eat it myself.
* * *
—
Yesterday, I asked Dikla if she would mind reading something new I was working on. Of course, I waited for the right moment. I waited for her to come back from her evening run. Ten kilometers. I waited for her to finish showering. Shampoo, conditioner, body lotion. I waited for her to put on the sweat suit she wears at home and the thick woolen socks she bought in London when she was there with that twenty-something guy. I waited for her to brew her homeopathic tea, spread her long legs on the couch and sip it. I waited for her cheeks to redden from the heat of the tea and her eyes to become shiny, as if she were crying.
Then I asked her.
She said she didn’t have time for it. She’s in the middle of another book, a thriller, by that Scandinavian writer, Wolff? You know, the one who looks like a Viking?
I persisted. I asked again.
She shook her head and said that, the Viking aside, it was just too soon for her to read something of mine. That until now, she could always separate the story from the writer, my fantasies from the reality of our life, but she wasn’t sure she could do that now.
A wave of coldness flooded my body. Like the one I’d felt at the edge of the abyss on Death Road in Bolivia.
I went into the kitchen to load the dishwasher and said to myself, It won’t be easy, but that’s my mission: to do everything to make her believe once again that everything except her is and always will be only a story.
What kind of music do you listen to?
Damn that song. Even when our love was very much alive, there was something stressful about listening to it on the radio when we were driving together. Even when the drive could end in our turning onto a dirt road to undress each other, right then, because we couldn’t wait—those lyrics sounded like an ominous prophecy that would come true in the end, because even we, whether we wanted to or not, would follow the herd of mumbling souls—
Now, a week after returning home from my exile in the studio, we’re driving to the wedding of one of her employees. And there’s a traffic jam on the highway.
We’ll be late, Dikla thinks.
Of course, I think. It took you so long to get ready.
I’m getting old, it takes time to camouflage it, Dikla thinks.
You just get more attractive with the years, I think.
Colombia, she thinks.
Not a word is spoken.
And then that song that Ariel Horowitz wrote for his wife, Tamar Giladi (how does a woman feel when a man writes a song for her called “Love Is Dead”?)—
And both of us, at the same moment, reach for the dial to change the station.
All of your books are written in the same style. Have you ever thought of writing something completely different? Maybe science fiction? Fantasy?
So let’s say I wrote something about a different planet. And let’s say that planet had two suns. And three moons, one of which was the planet’s Siberia, where people were sent for punishment. And let’s say that every new person you met on that new planet wasn’t really new to you, because a few seconds before the encounter, all the intimate information the Web had collected on him was transmitted into your brain. And let’s say there was an underground of people who wanted to disconnect from the Web so they wouldn’t know everything. People who believed that life without secrets was not worth living. And let’s say that the authorities on the planet persecuted those people in the underground. Or the idea of democracy didn’t yet exist, and the council of representatives of various giant Web corporations ran things. And let’s say that the leader of the underground was a woman with a dark secret in her past. Really dark. Which was revealed to every new person who met her. And let’s say she was sick of it, which is why she had the need to conceal, to leave the past behind and turn over a new leaf. And let’s say she knew a hacker named Tristan Carmeli, who fell in love with her despite her dark secret, or maybe because of it. And Tristan Carmeli managed to find a way to hide her and all the underground people somewhere inside the Web. Not outside the Web—because that’s where the authorities would search for them—but inside it. Very deep inside it. Intra
-Web. Like an air bubble in bread. And let’s say that Tristan Carmeli lived deep inside that intra-Web hiding place and wrote poems about the world that he and the other underground people would have liked to live in. And let’s say that his poems had to be short, shorter than haiku, so he could conceal them in code. And let’s say that one of the poems was:
I will wait here
Until the first leaf
Falls
And the other poem was:
Once
To travel
Without destination
And let’s say that, in the end, he couldn’t control himself and wrote a longer poem, maybe even a story, to the leader of the underground, confessing that he thought her dark secret, the secret she tried so hard to hide from the world, was beautiful. And let’s say that because of that overlong poem, the underground was exposed and all its members received the harshest punishment of all: a full Wikipedia entry loaded with links. And banishment to the third, Siberian moon. And let’s say there was an iRobot with a sense of humor in the story. And a forest where the trees could run. And cars that turned into jet fighters with the click of a button. And an app that enabled you to see the dream you had last night, along with possible interpretations, on your phone display.
What difference does it make.
In any case, it would turn out that once again, I wrote about an impossible love.
Have you written any stories you would never publish?
MAYAN’S PICTURE
So listen. I lost your picture when we moved. And I really tried to make sure nothing happened to it. I put it into a plastic sleeve, an entire plastic sleeve for one small picture. I have no idea how it happened. I still hope I’ll find it, there are two or three cartons we haven’t had time to unpack yet, but chances are I won’t. And it’s breaking my heart, you know? I kept it with me all the time, I want you to know that. Since your mother came over and handed it to me after the lecture in Ganei Tikva and told me that they found a book in your backpack, which returned on the plane along with you.
Look, this is Mayan, she said, pointing to you in the picture.
Even before she pointed, I knew it was you. Something in your expression. If I had been your age and traveled to South America and we met in some ramshackle hostel for trekkers—I would have fallen in love with you, Mayan. I have no doubt at all. I’m a powder keg of emotion just waiting for a match, and the way you’re standing on the sand, your right foot slightly forward, your left hand on your waist—even though it’s a still, I can guess how you walk, Mayan. Your steps are like a dance, and you tilt your head a bit to the right when you approach people, right?
I kept the picture in my hand even after the taxi picked me up and looked at it for a long time: four girls in bathing suits. One of them, not you, was holding a surfboard. I liked the picture because, contrary to what I would expect from a trek picture, there was no pretense in it. It looked as if someone sneaked up on you and took your picture before any of you were ready. None of the girls but you looks especially happy. To be honest, you all look beat. People don’t talk about it when they come back, but wandering is exhausting, and there are so many moments of extreme loneliness on a trek, aren’t there?
At home, I propped your picture up against the books on the shelf in my den. It was so small that it fell a few times before I understood how to position it on Yehuda Amichai’s Achziv, Caesarea and One Love—do you know it?—which jutted out a bit from the other books. But even then, I would occasionally find that, when I was out, a gust of wind had blown the picture onto the floor. I would pick it up and put it back on Amichai. Gently.
It was obvious to me that people who entered the room would have something to say about that picture. A man who keeps a picture of four girls in bikinis in his den—how could they not make remarks and give me a conspiratorial pat on the back. But I never gave them an explanation. I never told anyone the story behind that picture. Even a story monger like me has his red lines. They can all go fuck themselves, I thought, it’s something that has to stay between you and me.
What I did do sometimes—can I admit it?—was look at you before I started to write. It helped light a fire under me and made me remember that there was someone on the other side.
To be honest, it’s become a ritual lately, standing in front of your picture before I start to write. Like a moment of silence on Memorial Day, except without the siren. (Tell me, Mayan, did you raise your head and look at other people’s bowed heads during the moment of silence at school? I suspect you did. In the picture, too, you’re standing slightly apart from your friends, not completely a part of the group, sort of watching from the sidelines.)
In any case, when we moved, your picture disappeared. As if there were a hidden abyss between the apartments into which only the most important things dropped. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to tell you in this letter, Mayan. That you have become someone important in my life. Without ever having met. Without ever having spoken. Without ever having written to each other. Somehow, it happened. I’ve become attached to you. I began wondering what you would say about certain stories. Then I began consulting with you before making decisions about things that had nothing to do with my stories. One look into your green eyes, and suddenly it became absolutely clear to me what I should do. I told you—not out loud, I’m not crazy, at least I wasn’t until recently—about things that were happening in my life. About becoming my own jailer. About the fact that I dream about tunnels. About how it feels to be unloved in your own home. And about how your picture got lost—I really hope it hasn’t, and as soon I finish this letter, I’ll have to unpack those three cartons, and I pray I’ll find it there, but if the picture is really lost, I can’t see how I can go on from here. I mean, first of all, I can’t see how I can continue to write. If I don’t write, I have nowhere to put my memories, and that’s dangerous. I have a problem. I don’t forget anything. My forgetting mechanism is completely screwed up. All the partings, the deaths, the unexploited opportunities. They are all trapped in my body, and writing is the only way to release them. Like a passenger arriving at the check-in counter only to find that his suitcase weighs too much—I write because if I don’t occasionally unburden myself of the weight of some of those memories, I won’t be able to breathe. No air will enter my body. Or leave it.
I’m not exaggerating. It’s a matter of life and death for me. It always has been.
Sometimes I imagine your last trip, from La Paz to Coroico. If I close my eyes and really concentrate, it’s as if I’m with you and your friends in the van. I’m sitting beside you. Fear is making you sweat, and I smell the sweet scent. You’re wearing fisherman’s pants tied with a string, and your legs are pressed against each other. Our knees are almost touching. And on the turns, they do touch. Did you know that I once traveled on that hellish road too? When your mother came over to me with the picture after my lecture in Ganei Tikva, I didn’t tell her. I didn’t want to hurt her with the fact that I survived. But I’d also been warned about that road, twenty years before you were, and I didn’t pay any attention either. When you’re twenty-something, warnings are like flies you shoo away with your hand. But I remember that during the first hour of the ride, I realized I was in real danger. The lane was terrifyingly narrow and three days of constant rain had softened the shoulders, turning them into mud. Every time a van came from the opposite direction, our driver executed some frightening and risky maneuvers in reverse: In order to let the other van pass us, he had to pull back so that the rear end of our van was almost hanging over the ravine, but not completely, because then the center of gravity might move too far back.
At some point I closed my eyes. I couldn’t keep looking into the chasm that opened beneath us without getting seriously dizzy. Did you close your eyes too? Or maybe you opened them when the drop began? Whenever I picture that precise moment of your final trek, I suddenly feel a
powerful desire—idiotic but powerful—to save you. After all, I took a medic’s course in the army. If I had reached you in time, and not twenty-four hours later, like those useless Bolivians, maybe I could have saved you. I don’t know whether you had a normal life, and even if you did, after a five-hundred-meter drop in a van that turned over at least six times before it stopped at the bottom of the wadi—but maybe, who knows, who can know…
I kept my eyes closed almost all the way to Coroico, opening them only when there were potholes and the van juddered.
The two Germans who were with me didn’t speak, either. I remember that one of them had a book. He held it open as if he were calm enough to read, but he didn’t turn a page for a long time.
Suddenly it turned very cold.
Each of us huddled into his poncho.
The German with the book closed it and pushed it under his thigh.
A list of things I still hadn’t done passed through my mind: becoming a father, publishing a book, learning to scuba dive. Silently, I recited the haftora from my bar mitzvah from beginning to end three times. I shoved my hands under my thighs to keep them from shaking. I wanted so much to live then. I mean—
I think I already knew then that life brings pain. Of course I knew. But the proportions were different: There were more desires. The pain was duller.
Over this past year, because of the dysthymia, I sometimes wake up in the morning with a pain in my other heart, not the one that pumps blood but the one behind it that feels fear and anxiety, and the pain is so strong that I have to ask the question, THE question—
But until now, I always had a clear answer.
I would go over to your picture.
There’s a hint of a smile in the corner of your mouth. Not an actual smile. Definitely not laughter. More an inclination of the mouth that hints at an inclination of the soul toward goodness.