by Eshkol Nevo
Do you understand? This entire year—maybe it’s even longer? It’s hard to know exactly when the deterioration began, or why, maybe Ari’s illness was the trigger, or Shira’s departure for Sde Boker. In any case, this last year I’ve been a musician who’s lost the rhythm of the piece he’s playing, in the middle of a performance, in front of hundreds of people. All the other musicians are waiting for him to get back in step. The audience is already whispering. But he can’t manage to do it. Every time I looked at your smile this last year, it reminded me that I haven’t always been like this. Which means that maybe this dysthymia thing is just a tunnel I have to pass through. Then I’ll reach the light.
I still have three cartons to unpack. We put them in my den temporarily, and they’ve been here, piled one on the other like blocks in a kindergarten. I’ve postponed opening them for a few days already, each time with a different excuse.
Actually, this whole letter is an attempt to postpone opening them for another few hours. To leave us a chance, even a small one.
Were you ever in therapy?
I decided to surprise Dikla at the Watsu pool. Once every two weeks, she took off early from work, went there to do Watsu, aquatic shiatsu, and came home a different person. More radiant.
I thought, We’ll go out to eat after her treatment. It could be a propitious time.
I arrived a few minutes before two thirty. There’s a kind of waiting space there with cushions and poufs. And a pleasant breeze. A thin partition separated it from the pool.
At first, music came from the direction of the pool. Just music. And then the music stopped and I heard Dikla say something. Her therapist, Gaia, replied. Then there was the kind of trickling sound of someone coming out of the water. Then some more trickling, similar but different. Now they were both standing close to the partition and I heard Dikla say, “In any case, before the bat mitzvah, I don’t plan to make any deci—”
In the middle of the word, they moved the partition and came out together.
Dikla is tall and narrow-shouldered. Gaia is short and broad-shouldered.
A thought ran through my mind: I wonder how they look when they’re in the water.
Dikla completed the word—“sion”—before she realized it was me, sitting on the pouf. She stopped talking.
In the tenth of a second it took for her to dredge up a reasonable response to my being there, I understood that she wasn’t happy to see me and they had apparently been talking about me. About us.
Hi, I said.
Hi, Dikla said and kissed me on the cheek. Not on the mouth.
I have a free hour, I said. I thought we could go to Goferman’s for something to eat.
They’ve closed, Gaia said.
And I have to drive Gaia home, Dikla said.
Right, I said, and casually took a step back.
But we can have coffee at Aroma, near the house, Dikla said.
Okay, I said, see you there. Then I said to Gaia, I want you to know that I’m really jealous of Dikla. The way she looks when she comes home from here makes me think that Watsu therapy is just what I need.
You’re always welcome, Gaia said, her tone reserved.
* * *
—
We didn’t have coffee at Aroma. Dikla got stuck in traffic on the way back from Gaia’s and then it was time to pick up Yanai from day care.
But I did go for Watsu therapy. A week later. Not at the same pool Dikla goes to, so as to not invade her territory (that’s how I felt, like an unwanted invader).
On the way to Safed to give a lecture, I stopped at Amuka. There’s a therapeutic pool there too. From the outside, it looks like a greenhouse, and inside—water and a wooden deck, a small dressing room, and robes for men.
I don’t remember the name of the therapist who greeted me. Fifty-something, long hair gathered into a ponytail with a rubber band, soft eyes.
The water was hot, but not too hot.
I leaned on the rim of the pool and asked her, How exactly does this work?
You’ll see in a minute, the therapist said with a smile, and asked, How are you?
How am I?
Yes, how are you?
So many people have asked me how I am these last few weeks, I thought, but no one asked like that. With simple curiosity. Not prying. In a way that required an honest answer.
I hurt, I said.
Where?
In my posterior heart.
Your posterior heart?
Not the one that pumps blood, the one that’s afraid of losing people.
Where exactly is it located, this posterior heart.
In my back, between my shoulders. That’s where I feel it.
Is there someone in particular that you…are afraid of losing?
The truth is that I’m afraid of losing a few…someones.
Okay, she said, and instead of asking me about my childhood and my relationship with my parents, she leaned forward and put floaties around my ankles, took hold of my fingers, and in a slow, continuous movement, cradled me into her body and began to slide me through the water. Gently, at first, like a paper boat, and then slightly faster. I closed my eyes, but a series of practical concerns kept me from abandoning myself to it: I hadn’t asked her how long the session lasted. I still had to drive to Safed, a minimum of twenty minutes away. Do they accept credit cards? And if not, where the hell would I find an ATM in this out-of-the-way place?
Slowly, the water separated me from my thoughts. Of all the images that came into my mind during that session in Amuka, I remember only two—
The first very brief, really only a flash—Shira walking into the boarding school at Sde Boker, her curls bouncing on her back, dragging two suitcases, one in each hand, as I wondered whether she would turn around for a last look.
The second slightly longer—Dikla and I cutting and running out of the Arad music festival because it was too crowded for her and going down to the Dead Sea. We found an unpopulated beach and went into the water. Before that, I had never been able to float in the Dead Sea. I always thought it was something that happened to other people. But that evening, Dikla and I found a position: her legs on my shoulders, my legs on her shoulders. We held hands and floated, looking at each other and talking. Balance was very precarious. One wrong movement, one wrong word, and we both might lose our equilibrium.
Other images followed. I might have fallen asleep for a few minutes. At some point, the therapist massaged a few shiatsu pressure points between my shoulders, where my posterior heart is, then hummed a song I didn’t try to identify.
In talk therapy, you can tell the session is about to end when your therapist takes a quick glance at his watch or when he begins to prepare you verbally for the separation.
In Watsu, it’s more like music: Something in the melody of the gliding signaled me.
The therapist returned me to the edge of the pool, still grasping my fingers, and then released them, one by one, until my hand was left floating on the water.
I dove. Resurfaced. Opened my eyes and said, Thank you.
You’re welcome, she said, and asked, What sign are you?
Pisces.
I could tell, she said, adding, you’re welcome to shower. I have to get moving, but I’ll leave you some tea and dates on the table.
* * *
—
I drank the tea and thought, Body therapy works much better for me than talk therapy. The body can’t lie.
After the lecture in Safed, I drove to Haifa, to that store in Hadar, and found a rare David Bowie CD for Dikla. It had only Bowie’s voice singing the whole Ziggy Stardust album a capella, clean, exposed, no embellishment, no arrangement. I put it on the passenger seat. I touched the bag occasionally, thinking that Noam’s bat mitzvah was still a few months away and maybe all was not lost.
What question
that you have never been asked would you like to be asked?
What do you think about when a German actor stands on a stage in Munich and reads a forty-minute passage from one of your books? No, really. You pretend you’re listening to him. You have to pretend. There are people in the audience. Not many, but there they are. Well-dressed. The Holocaust is always in the background of every event in Germany, lending it an air of gravity. And yes, for the first minute, you’re still looking for Hagai Carmeli in the sparse audience, but then you have another thirty-nine minutes, and you can’t really spend thirty-nine minutes listening to a text you don’t understand a word of. So where do your thoughts wander? How many of them are devoted to Ari, who is dying the hospital? How many to your wife, who continues to be cold and distant? How many to women who aren’t your wife? How many to your daughter, who left for boarding school and doesn’t want to speak to you? How many to guessing which of the silver-haired people in the hall were in the SS? How many to what the exchange rate of the euro is? And could it be that right then, as your thoughts wander freely and your body is relaxed, free of any obligation, the seed of your next book is born?
Could you write in a language that isn’t Hebrew?
No way.
In your opinion, what role should the Jews of the Diaspora play in relation to Israel?
They should come to meetings with Israeli writers.
Because no one else does anymore.
Except for BDS members, who stand up and leave the hall together, in open protest, as soon as you begin to speak, leaving you alone with the presenter and the interpreter. And the two girls from the publishing house who are constantly checking messages on their cell phones.
Obviously, former Israelis come to hear your lectures abroad. How do those encounters make you feel?
She comes into the hall a bit late. She was always a bit late for our dates. I would wait for her on the bench in the park near her parents’ house on Harufeh Street and build up my expectations. I recognize her immediately, even though it’s been nine years since I saw her last, during Book Week, when the event still took place in Yarkon Park. We used to meet there, as if by accident; she worked for Steimatzky, the book distributor, and I was autographing books at a stand, knowing that at some point, she’d come to see me, and, sitting so close to each other that our chairs almost touched, we’d talk. Rather, she would talk, and I would mainly listen. As usual. And when I caught a whiff of the scent of her hair, something inside me was aroused. An echo of something. After we’d exchanged kisses on the cheek and she’d left, people, I mean men, would come up to me and ask about that woman I’d sat with for so long. I’d answer proudly, My first girlfriend, sometimes adding: For four years, from the middle of my senior year in high school until I was discharged from the army.
During one of those Book Week conversations, she told me that she was getting married. Even though I didn’t want to marry her, I was jealous. She had a beautiful coffee-colored birthmark to the left of her navel, and I loved to linger there, my lips on it, until moving farther down. And she had this gesture—running her fingers under her curls and shifting them, all at once, from left to right. And she played the flute very well, but not well enough for the army orchestra. She loved to tease me, didn’t get along with my mother, and unintentionally—sometimes intentionally—insulted the few girlfriends she had in high school by making tactless remarks. She sent me perfumed letters when I was in basic training and then the officer training course, and traveled from Haifa all the way south to Mitzpe Ramon on the Saturdays I stayed on the base, just to sleep with me and then go back. She was discharged a year before me, and went to work as a security checker at the airport. She sprayed a bit of perfume on herself at four in the morning, when she heard the short beep of the cab that had come to pick her up for work. But she quit that job after two months because she didn’t get along with the shift manager. She had to earn a living doing something, so she babysat for, among others, my older sister. Until the incident.
She didn’t want to go to the annual Arad music festival with me, a week after the incident, and didn’t answer when I asked if that was the reason. When I came back from Arad, she said hi, without moving her eyes from the TV screen. For weeks, she didn’t want to sleep with me, or she slept with me without any desire and without coming. She started going out to salsa nights without me, and came home later and later, her clothes smelling of cigarettes. She didn’t try to stop me when I began putting my clothes into large garbage bags, and she didn’t say: Don’t go, I love you. She didn’t come to my grandmother’s house in Holon to ask me to come back, and didn’t send messages through mutual friends, and when I went to the apartment to collect the few things I’d left behind, she made sure not to be there.
* * *
—
She canceled her wedding a week before the date. Mutual acquaintances who had received invitations told me. I wasn’t surprised. It was just like her. Later, I heard from those acquaintances that she met someone else, a guy who came in second in a national high-jump competition, married him a month later, and moved with him to the United States, to a town in the Midwest. Because of some job offer he’d received. Or a sports grant.
The Midwest is far away and not on the way to anywhere. Our mutual acquaintances broke off contact with her and I didn’t hear any gossip about her for years. I had almost completely stopped having dreams of running hand in hand with her, escaping from something, and it had been a long time since I took her letters out of the shoe box I kept them in to check whether they still gave off the scent of her perfume.
And now here she is. In the third row on the right. The lecture I prepared is over, and now people are asking questions, too many questions, and I answer, Yes, Hebrew is assimilated by other languages, but is that necessarily a bad thing? And someone asks, Would you be a writer if you weren’t born in Israel? I offer my ready answer, constantly stealing glances at her, trying to figure out how I can skip out on the kosher dinner, another kosher dinner, that the Jewish community organized for after the event—
In the end, I tell the organizers the truth. Listen, I see a childhood friend here, and this is the last night, we won’t have another chance to talk, I hope it’s all right with you—
Look, they say, we’ve already reserved the restaurant—
She’s waiting on the side, as if embarrassed, but not really, biting the nail on her pinkie, a gesture I know very well, and crossing one leg over the other as she stands there, another gesture I know very well.
I don’t say anything, don’t back down, I know for certain that what I’m doing is not polite, but it’s obvious to me that I’m doing the right thing.
They look at me, look at her, and something apparently becomes clear to them, because they retreat, only reminding me that they will pick me up at seven tomorrow morning to take me to the airport.
We go outside and begin walking the downtown streets. I’m a bit cold, but she seems to be okay, so I don’t say anything about it. We walk in our regular positions, she on the left, I on the right, and I wonder if she notices this as well. She’s wearing tight jeans and a button-down denim shirt, and I remember the way her army shirt was tucked into her uniform pants, which were always a few sizes too big for her. I remember that, although she was a natural chatterbox, she always needed someone else to begin the conversation.
You look great, I say.
How can you tell? she teased me. It’s dark!
No, really, I say, smiling.
You, on the other hand, look older, she says. Then she caresses the back of my neck briefly—or simply lets her hand linger on it, depending on how you interpret it—then adds, What’s with all those white hairs?
I’m silent, admitting my guilt.
And since when did you become such a big lecturer? she adds. You used to be so shy.
Inside, I’m still shy.
You hide it very well.<
br />
Did you enjoy the lecture?
It was terrific, even though…
Even though what?
Never mind, we haven’t seen each other for nine years, and I’m already putting you down…
You started already, so go on—
You…fake it. You’re not really there. It feels like you’re giving a speech. Even the jokes you tell—it’s like you know they’ll work because they did in the past.
I guess you’re right.
But people enjoyed it, don’t worry. I’m the only one who noticed that you weren’t totally there.
I wasn’t there at all because of you, funny girl. The minute you came in, all I wanted was for the lecture to end, I think, but don’t say.
We reach the small lake—really just a puddle—in the middle of the little park. We sit down on a bench, which is slightly damp. The water in the puddle glistens like eyes.
So tell me, do you ever get used to this quiet? I ask.
You get addicted to it, she says.
You live close by? I ask, pointing in the general direction of the city.
No, we live in Cincinnati now. We moved not too long ago.
No kidding. So it was just my luck that you’re here?
No, you idiot, I came especially to see you. A two-hour drive.
Then she turned to me. Face-to-face. And immediately looked away.
* * *
—
It took time for me to work up the courage to kiss her. Back then, in Haifa.
We used to walk around the Carmel Center, somehow always arriving at the end of the Panorama Promenade that overlooks the refineries and the bay. On the one hand, the kiss was in the air, but on the other, her sarcasm undermined the already shaky self-confidence I had then. Before every date, I would decide, that’s it, this time it’ll happen, but the minute we exchanged our first words, I would decide to postpone leaning toward her until it was really the right moment. And then one night she said, in her usual cool tone, If you don’t want us to end up just friends, then you really should kiss me—