by Eshkol Nevo
I don’t remember specifically, but I do remember the idea: Every year, on the son’s birthday, the father calls from the place of his death to say happy birthday and hear how he is. Every conversation has its own poem, and every poem reveals to us the changes that have occurred in the son’s life that year. And how, with time, he is becoming more like his father. Almost against his will.
You see, my escort had explained to me while we were still reading his notebook of poems, in our culture, the dividing line between life and death is more indistinct. Sometimes, it doesn’t even exist.
* * *
—
Damn it, I thought on the plane, how easy it is to put one over on me.
I took two sleeping pills and slept until we landed.
* * *
—
The first person I spoke to (I remember myself standing at the gift shop in the arrivals hall and putting the phone to my ear) was my father.
I warned you, he said.
You did.
So why did you rile them?
I didn’t think I was riling them, Dad. That guy, my escort—
Nerdy, writes poetry. I remember.
I never suspected for a single minute that—
Those are the people they choose for jobs like that, people who inspire trust.
Okay, the main thing is that I’m here, right Dad?
Right.
You know, all of a sudden I value the freedom of expression we have here.
Yes.
The fact that we can criticize freely, without fear.
For the time being.
Why “for the time being”?
Never mind. Should I come to pick you up, son?
No, it’s okay, I’ll take a taxi.
Call your mother after you’ve gotten organized, okay? But don’t tell her about the incident. Her heart is weak enough as it is.
The incident in Singapore occurred ten years ago, and I decided that I would never write or tell anyone about it. And so it remained banished from my life as if it were a leper.
But it isn’t only people who change with time. So do countries. I had a conversation a few hours ago. The literature teacher in the Itzhak Rabin High School in Ness Ziona called me. He began with compliments. Told me how excited the students were about the meeting with me the next day. Said they had prepared questions that he would print out for me. And then, after explaining where the best place to park was, he said, in a slightly tenser voice, Look, I have a request. More accurately, it’s a request from the administration that I ask you, if possible, to please not speak about controversial subjects. Politics, I mean. It’s better for all of us if you remain in the area code of literature. Family, love, childhood. You know. And you can save your criticism for more suitable opportunities. This is a rather sensitive time, you see. We’ve just asked the Ministry of Education for an addition to our budget. Apparently the supervisor, who is a personal friend of Minister Sirkin, will be present during your talk, and we don’t want to anger anyone now, of all times. You understand me, right?
* * *
—
My father warned me. I can’t say he didn’t.
I took a course with your father at the university. What is he doing these days? Can you send him regards from Hanita Brodetsky? I hope he remembers me.
My father still goes down to the beach on Saturdays at six in the morning, dear Hanita. He loves to swim in freezing water. I absolutely do not love to swim in freezing water, but when we spend a Saturday in Haifa, I go down to the beach with him because I like sitting in the Kadarim restaurant with him after his swim.
He had a heart attack when he was forty-nine. He survived and still plays basketball every Thursday, to this very day. But I still worry when he dives into the waves, and keep my eyes glued to him to make sure he doesn’t have another sudden heart attack in the middle of the sea. If I lose sight of him for more than a minute, I get really stressed, and once, a few years ago, I sent the lifeguard and everyone on the beach to look for him because I was terrified he had drowned, but it turned out that he had just swum to another beach.
These days, the sea is filled with jellyfish, so he doesn’t swim far out. And I can sit on the folding chair he always keeps in the car trunk—part of a full beach kit—and watch him snorkel in comfort. I have no idea why he swims in the Mediterranean Sea with a snorkel and mask, Dado Beach in Haifa isn’t exactly Ras Burqa in the Sinai, but I’ve learned to accept this just the way I learned to accept and love his other quirks: The fact that he keeps a motorcycle in the building parking lot without ever riding it. The fact that he spends entire Saturdays playing chess with himself. That he refuses to learn how to use Word and writes all his articles with a fountain pen. That his favorite vacation spot is Tiberias.
There were years when I resented my father. Quietly and persistently, I nursed my anger toward him. And poured all that bitterness into the fathers I created in my books. But when I became a father myself, most of his anger-provoking behavior seemed suddenly understandable: He sometimes doesn’t answer when you speak to him? That’s only human, his head is filled with worry about making a living. He travels abroad for long periods of time? Obviously. A person needs to take a break. Sets a standard of integrity that is too high to live up to? Better than having a criminal for a father. Is unable to remain in the here and now, and always has to worry about his future and that of everyone around him? Okay, that’s something about him that still drives me crazy.
People who knew him—former students, colleagues, or army buddies (not just you, Hanita)—always come up to me after lectures and say: You look so much like your father, you know? And I say: Thank you. Or: That’s a real compliment. But I still wince slightly, an internal, imperceptible wince. A person wants to believe that he has free will. Then they ask how he is, and you can sense in their tone how much respect and affection they have for him. And I reply, He’s great, thank you, and think to myself: I’m lucky to have him for a father.
My father comes out of the water now. His body looks like mine will look in thirty years. Only the scar on his chest from his surgery is still red, as if it were only yesterday that he was rushed to the hospital. He towels himself off. Puts on his glasses. Clips the sunshade on them. Gives me his wallet and says: Order us the regular?
When he comes back from the shower, the regular is already on the table: Two short espressos. Two soda waters. A plate of labane. A plate of hummus. A plate of pickled vegetables. A plate of sliced onions.
He sips his espresso and asks: So what do you hear from Shira’le?
I don’t hear anything from her, I want to say. She hasn’t spoken to me since she left, only to Dikla. But instead, I say: Everything’s good. She’s happy there at Sde Boker.
He wants to say: What kind of parents are you that your daughter ran away from you? What did you do to her? But instead, he says: That’s wonderful. Really wonderful.
He takes another sip of his espresso and asks: And how is Arieh?
For some reason, he always calls Ari “Arieh.” I don’t correct him anymore. Once, when I still had a lot of things, they both helped me move, and after we finished unpacking the last carton in the new apartment, my father invited us to a restaurant and ordered a second steak and another shashlik for Ari, patted him on the shoulder, and said, Eat, eat, you deserve it, you’re a good friend.
Not too great, I reply. I mean, the doctors aren’t…optimistic.
It’s a cruel disease, my father says with a sigh.
Yes, I say.
You visit him in the hospital, don’t you?
Of course, I say, he’s at home right now, so I visit him there.
It’s important, because…he says, and stops. He pulls off a piece of pita and dips it into the hummus. Which is suspicious. Usually, the hummus is mine and the labane is his. And he adds sugar to his espress
o, which he also never does. Only then does he continue: I had a friend, I don’t know if I told you about him—
Mickey, I say his name to myself. And think: Grandpa told me, Grandma told me, Mom told me about your best friend who was killed in the Yom Kippur War—you’re the only one who never did.
Mickey was in my high-school class. He…was killed in the Chinese Farm battle. The Saturday before he was killed, we both went home on leave…he lived on a street parallel to mine. And I said I’d stop by to see him in the evening.
Yes.
But I didn’t.
Yes.
If you happened to hear this story from Grandma, she must have said that I fell asleep.
You didn’t?
I was just feeling lazy.
Yes, Dad.
So what I’m saying is, visit Ari. Another espresso?
No thanks, Dad. I can’t fall asleep at night as it is.
He called the waiter over and ordered another espresso. He never does that either, I think. He asks the waiter how he is. How it’s going in the university. The waiter is one of the owner’s sons, and since we started going there, he’s always been the one to take our order. Now he tells my dad about a bureaucratic problem he’s come up against at the university, and my dad gives him some advice. And writes down his phone number, in case he needs it. He’s always eager to help, my dad. He’s never nasty.
So why can’t you fall asleep, son? he asks when the waiter leaves. My mother once told me that one of the reasons she fell in love with him was his remarkable ability to return to a conversation at the exact—and I mean exact—moment it was broken off.
No real reason. I’m a light sleeper, you know.
Like your mother.
You have to know which traits to inherit from whom. Color blindness from you, and from her—
So tell me, is everything with Dikla okay?
Yes, of course, why? Because she doesn’t come to Haifa with us? You know Dikla, always busy.
That’s true, he says, sounding a tiny bit dubious. But dubious nevertheless. And I know that he suspects something is very much not all right between me and Dikla. Because how much can you hide from your parents, especially if they’re psychologists, and I know that now he’ll turn around to face the sea, giving me the space I need to begin telling him what happened. I suspect that Mickey’s story was a chess player’s maneuver meant to leave me open to this moment, and I know I can tell him that I’m in trouble—yesterday I told Dikla that nothing actually happened in Colombia, that I had made up the story of cheating because I felt she was moving away from me and I wanted to shake her up, and she looked at me for a long time and said: You’re screwed up, you know? All screwed up—and if I tell him that, I will have the benefit of his wisdom, his experience and kindness, his considered opinion, and all the qualities that put light in the eyes of the people who come up to me after my lectures—your eyes too, Hanita?—to speak about him. I know that he will be cautious and discreet about every intimate detail I reveal to him, he is very far from being a gossip. I also know that the window of opportunity here is narrow, because my Dad might be a psychologist but he is also a man of long silences, not a man who bulldozes, and in another minute, he’ll turn around from the sea, signal the waiter to bring the bill, and say, Mom is waiting for us, we should go back. I know all this, but nonetheless, say nothing.
Why, starting from a certain age, can’t we share anything important with our parents, Hanita? Is it because, as Genesis tells us “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife,” or is it just because we don’t want to worry or burden them? Or maybe we want to maintain the image of successful, thriving people we hope they see when they look at us? Then again, maybe I’m the only one who is silent with his father, Hanita, and as I write to you, millions of people in the world are sharing whatever is on their minds with their parents, without hesitation.
On the way back to the Carmel, we talked about Noam’s bat mitzvah and about movies. My father loves to go to the movies and then criticize them as if he is, at the very least, a newspaper movie reviewer. Action movies are the only ones he really loves, and that’s because they have no pretensions of being quality films.
In the end, I asked about you, Hanita. He doesn’t remember you, but don’t take offense. At home, my mother is responsible for the long-term memories, and when we got home and I asked her, she immediately said, Hanita Brodetsky, of course. She reminded him that you studied statistics with him and remembered who your boyfriend was, and she even remembered what you used to wear. In short, my parents send you their warm regards.
When will they produce a film adaptation of your latest book? When I read it, I could actually imagine the movie.
What a book! he said, shaking his head in disbelief. What a book!
Thank you.
I started reading it in the duty-free shop and couldn’t put it down for the whole flight.
Thank you, thank you very much.
The minute I finished it, I said to my wife: This is a movie.
Really?
She didn’t hear me, she fell asleep.
My wife sleeps on flights too.
Your writing is so…visual. And the dialogue? Pure pleasure.
I’m glad you think so.
Between you and me, we could start filming tomorrow.
Great.
There’s only one small thing.
Yes?
They’d probably have to move the story to Jerusalem.
Jerusalem?
Because of the Jerusalem Fund special grant for movies filmed in the city.
But—
And the heroine—would you object to her being German instead of Israeli?
Why?
It leaves the door open to a coproduction with the German company that worked with us on Springtime in Sobibor.
But—
Which, by the way, has just been accepted to the Cannes Film Festival.
Wonderful, but—
Do you have a suit and tie?
Yes, why?
You’ll need it to walk on the red carpet in another two years.
But—
I get the impression that something’s bothering you.
Actually, yes. How can the heroine be German if she meets the hero when they’re both in the Israeli navy?
Everything is fixable.
What do you mean?
Why do they have screenwriters if not to fix things like that?
I don’t see how scree—
Here’s an example: Germany sells submarines to Israel, right?
Let’s say it does.
So one day he’s standing on the pier and her submarine emerges from the water. Like Bo Derek.
Didn’t you say it takes place in Jerusalem?
Right, so there’s no problem at all. She comes to the Western Wall. He’s an army security guard there.
But—
And then we can get a development grant from the Cornucopia Fund.
The Cornucopia Fund?
They back films that have Jewish content.
But—
I hope it’s okay with you that I’ve already called Gal Gadot’s agents.
About what?
What do you mean, “about what”? About the lead role. I sent them the book.
But—
You know how much it will help market the movie if she agrees to star in it?
But…the heroine is…small and shy.
She was small and shy. In the book.
And in the movie?
She’ll be Gal Gadot.
I don’t know.
What is there not to know?
I feel that the connection between the book and the movie is getting weaker.
You w
ant to drink something?
No thanks.
Excuse me for saying it like this, you know, straight out, but you have to loosen up.
Loosen up?
Cinema, it’s a different kind of art. It has its own rules.
Yes, but—
We once worked with that kind of writer, faithful to the source. You don’t want to know how it ended.
So what is it that you’re actually proposing?
Go home, sleep on it, and come by tomorrow to sign a contract.
I’m not sure that—
Ah, yes, another thing.
What?
The title.
What’s wrong with the title?
Would you buy a ticket to a movie called Osmosis?
What’s wrong with Osmosis?
Half the people don’t know what it means. And for the ones who do know, it sounds scary.
So what do you suggest?
I’m not suggesting anything, the focus group suggested it.
Focus group?
What’s with you? You can’t find a single movie in the market today that didn’t have its title checked first by a focus group.
Okay—
Operation Love.
Excuse me?
That’s the name they picked. The company that organizes focus groups for us said there wasn’t a single objection. They haven’t had such a unanimous focus-group decision for a long time.
But what’s the connection between the title and the—
There’s love in your book?
Yes.
There’s a military operation in it?
An unsuccessful military operation.
What difference does it make?
Friendly fire. It’s a…political statement.
Friendly fire during an operation or not during an operation?
During an operation.
I’m glad you’re happy with the title.
But—
I want you to feel part of the process.
I—
And also, it’s important that, when you’re interviewed, you say how pleased you are.