The Last Interview

by Eshkol Nevo

  The stage is yours, Bassel said.

  I began to speak, and when I finished, I stayed for a long time answering questions. Unlike what I might have expected, the questions did not focus on the political aspects of the book. I think that more than anything, my Syrian readers wanted to know what was “real” in the book and what wasn’t. They weren’t the first to ask that, of course, readers in general are determined to get to the biographical core of the book, based on the erroneous assumption that it will help them understand it. But my Syrian readers were more than determined, they were obsessed. For hours, I answered as patiently as I could, and in the end, I concluded by saying that, usually, the more I “lie” in biographical terms, the closer I actually get to the deep truth that is beyond the facts.

  Finally, they gave me a mild round of applause.

  Bassel came onto the stage, asked me to sign his copy, and then introduced me to the man I thought was Ron Arad. This is Ghalib, he said. He will be happy to show you the city in the brief time you still have here.

  * * *

  —

  I asked Ghalib to take me to the Jewish quarter, to the house behind the synagogue. We drove there, and on the way, I examined his profile, trying to decide if he was him.

  When we arrived, I asked for and received permission to take a picture of the building that now stood on the ruins of my father-in-law’s childhood home.

  Ghalib remained a short distance away from me, stroking his beard slowly and looking around with visible discomfort. Finally, he approached me, pointed to his watch, and said in fluent English that the van was already waiting to take me back home. And that I mustn’t be late.

  During the drive, I looked at his profile again. From a certain angle, he still looked like Ron Arad, but from a different angle, he suddenly looked like Hagai Carmeli. Hagai Carmeli with a beard.

  Tell me please, aren’t you…? I asked him in English a moment before we parted.

  No, he replied in Hebrew, and shoved me into the van.

  * * *

  —

  I knew that no one would believe I took the picture of the house behind the synagogue in Damascus myself. So at Friday dinner in Ma’alot, I made up a story about a Kurd who came up to me in Izmir, reprimanded me for my mistakes about the descriptions of kubeh in my book, and pulled out a picture he had taken a few years earlier on a visit to relatives in Damascus, who told him that the building they lived in was built on the ruins of a house in the Jewish quarter.

  I didn’t think anyone would buy the ridiculous story, but guess what, they swallowed it whole (sometimes it’s much easier to believe a lie than the truth).

  Dikla’s father, in any case, held the picture for a long time. He shed a single tear that detached from his eye like a space shuttle separating from the mother ship, and then he put the picture down and asked, Who wants fruit salad?

  How is the younger generation of writers different from the older generation?

  Among the photos of family trips to Eshtaol Forest is one—as if it didn’t belong—of a man with gray hair and a small paunch, leaning on a slide and looking off into the distance, his expression melancholy. I looked at that picture for quite a few seconds until I realized—

  * * *

  —

  When I was thirteen, my voice started to change. I remember how estranged we became, my voice and I. I felt as if someone else was speaking from my throat.

  For the past year, I’ve been taking off my glasses before I look in the mirror. I’d rather not see the changes. But I can see them in other people’s eyes. In women’s eyes.

  Only in the world of literature am I still considered a member of the younger generation.

  Before we grew distant from each other, Dikla used to say: You look better now than you did when we met.

  We both knew it was a lie. That we were going downhill. But that wasn’t the issue—

  The issue was the incongruity. Inside, I’m twenty-five, just back from my trip to South America, and outside, I’m this man with the graying hair and the paunch, in a picture taken on a trip to Eshtaol Forest.

  What embarrasses you?

  Walking into a meeting hall and discovering that projected on the large screen behind the stage is a huge picture of me taken fifteen years ago, in which I look the way I looked fifteen years ago.

  When was the last time you wanted to cry?

  The tests showed that the Canadian drug wasn’t working.

  Ari didn’t tell me.

  But his mother called. Said that the tests had come back and the results were unequivocal.

  She said: Get over to his apartment quickly, corazón. So someone will be with him now.

  I said: Claro. Of course.

  When I arrived, he acted as if everything was as usual. I kept waiting for him to tell me about the test results, but he talked about Hapoel Jerusalem. Said he felt like there was hope this year. That the team is in synch. And there’s the new arena too. He watches the games on TV, and aside from all the statistics, he’s noticed that the team finally has character. We have Yotam and Lior, who are winners, he said, and they’ll pull the others up with them.

  I played along with the conversation. I offered my opinion. I even argued with him about whether new players should be brought in or whether they would throw their great teamwork out of synch. And the entire time, I was thinking: In the end, he’ll talk about the tests.

  In the end, he said, I’m a little tired, bro. Thanks for coming.

  And he pulled the blanket up to his neck and closed his eyes.

  I knew he was pretending to sleep.

  So I controlled myself and didn’t cry.

  * * *

  —

  All the way home, I pictured myself collapsing in Dikla’s arms. How I would open the door and say, I need you, Diki. Can you please love me again? At least for one night?

  Sitting in the living room was Ariel, the babysitter, and waiting for me on the kitchen table was a note: I’m at a party with Gaia. Home late. Don’t wait up.

  The difference between faint hope and no hope is infinite.

  I asked Ariel, Do you have a minute?

  What?

  I need to talk to someone, I said, do you have a minute?

  He looked at me in horror and said, They’re expecting me at—

  Sure, I said. Of course. Here, take—how much do we owe you?

  * * *

  —

  I went into Yanai’s room. He has a convertible bed, so I opened it and lay down next to him. I imagined a life in which I was allowed to see him and Noam only twice a week, and I thought to myself: I’ll never survive it. It wasn’t exactly a thought. More like asphyxiation. Then I said the word “enough” to myself. And three more times out loud: Enough. Enough. Enough.

  I stood up and went to Shira’s room. That is, the room that had been Shira’s and now was a kind of playroom no one played in. When Shira lived at home, she never went to sleep. At night, after I came home from my talks, I used to go into her room, sit on the edge of her bed, and listen to the dramas she had lived through during the day. She said she wanted me to “advise her,” but I knew that if I really dared to give her advice, she’d throw me out. So I would nod. And nod again. And sometimes even share with her the victories and defeats I had experienced when I was her age. I noticed that knowing that I too had wondered and blundered calmed her down. Now I sat on the edge of the bed. I stroked the blanket for a while. And nodded into the darkness.

  Dikla woke me when she came home and said to me: Come to bed, sleep normally. I followed her. In bed, I told her about Ari. She was silent and groped for my hand. I stayed awake all night, holding her hand. I didn’t want morning to come.

  When was the last time you cried?

  It was in the seventh grade. Or the eleventh. I’m not sure.

  There w
as a grammar test. Before the class, I went through the textbook and memorized the exceptions to the rule for the last time, and when the teacher walked in, I forgot to put the book back in my bag.

  She handed out the test papers and when everyone began to write, she walked around from desk to desk. I remember the clack of her high heels. Her Farrah Fawcett hairdo. The smell of her perfume. Older women’s perfume. When she reached my desk, she stopped, picked up the book, and shouted: What is this supposed to be? She waved the book around in front of my eyes and I said: Sorry, I forgot it was on the desk. Oh come on, she said, you think I’m stupid? No, I replied, adding: Please believe me, it was an accident, I just forgot to put it in my bag. Her answer was to take my test, tear it in half, and put it back on my desk. Other kids giggled. Obviously at me. At my far-fetched explanation. I stood up, walked out of the classroom, and slammed the door behind me. Hard.

  There are moments in life when you’re bursting with love or mortification, and all you can do is walk and keep walking. So I left school and kept walking, and in Haifa in the eighties, if you walked long enough, you would reach the Carmel forest.

  I leaned against a tree, slipped down into a sitting position, and wept.

  There is nothing more humiliating than when someone doesn’t believe you. Even if you’re not telling the truth.

  Actually, there was another time I cried after that.

  I had come back from Ari’s place. It was before he got sick. We watched Barcelona play Chelsea. But there was another reason I’d gone to see him that evening. One of my books had just come out, and those few weeks before the first reviews appear are pretty much a nightmare. What has been internal for so long has suddenly become external, and you feel like you’re exposed. Like you’ve shown more than you intended to show. And no attempt to cover yourself with your hands can ever hide it.

  I knew that, at Ari’s place, there was no chance we’d talk about it, for one simple reason: He wasn’t crazy about my books. He tried to read the first one. Two months later, he returned it to me and said: I tried, bro. I really did. But I just couldn’t get into it. You’re not angry, are you? When I gave him the second one, which I had signed with a very personal dedication, he complimented the beautiful front cover, read the blurb on the back cover, and said, It’s pretty much like the first book, right? The same mindset?

  * * *

  —

  Aren’t you a little offended? Dikla asked when I told her.

  Just the opposite, I said, it’s great.

  What’s great about it?

  Everyone I’ve met since I started writing books treats me too much like a writer. He just treats me like me.

  * * *

  —

  That evening, he made chili con carne with black beans that he bought especially in a Mexican store in the central bus station. After Iniesta scored the winning goal for Barcelona at the last minute, we ate. I mean I ate. He devoured. And we drank, I mean I drank and he emptied one and a half bottles of Bitter Lemon.

  We talked about the decision of the district attorney’s office not to indict Yoram Sirkin for fraud and breach of trust. Ari, who had just become a partner in the law firm where he worked, said more than once that the decision didn’t prove that Sirkin hadn’t defrauded, only that they hadn’t found a smoking gun. Then we talked about the girl Ari was dating at the time, and there was a feeling in the air that maybe this time it would finally happen.

  The drive home from Tel Aviv was short and relaxed. No traffic jams, twenty minutes tops. There was happy music on the radio and a spring breeze drifting through the window, so nothing prepared me for what happened when I tried to get out of the car.

  Moving from sitting to standing is something you do a hundred times a day without thinking about it.

  The pain was so sharp that I almost fainted. I grabbed the side mirror with both hands to keep myself from collapsing on the street, and I closed my eyes until the dizziness passed. Then I took a few deep breaths and tried to straighten up—but my body refused to obey the command. I tried again. Nothing. Then I realized that I had left my phone in the car, on the passenger seat, and that I wasn’t able to bend toward it. And that I had no way to call for help. I kept my grip on the side mirror and looked around. At that time of night, all the tenants in our building were already asleep, and the parking area was totally silent, except for an owl that occasionally hooted from the treetops.

  I don’t know how long that humiliation lasted. Ten minutes. Maybe less. At some point, I began to cry. I hadn’t cried since that language test. Twenty years. Not that there hadn’t been reasons. My heart was broken at least three times. I wasn’t accepted into the military unit I wanted to join. My grandmother died. Dikla lost by five votes. Not a single tear.

  And suddenly, out of the blue, in the middle of the parking area. Alone, betrayed, clutching a side mirror.

  Luckily for me, a neighbor finally came out to throw her garbage into the bin. I called to her and she got Dikla, who somehow managed to push me into the backseat of the car and take me to the emergency room. Later, I did physical therapy for three months. I learned a series of preventive exercises, and also that each vertebra of the spine has a number.

  But to this very day, I haven’t forgiven my body.

  It’s so difficult to build trust after it has been betrayed.

  When was the last time you had a broken heart?

  I can’t write it. I shouldn’t. But I have to.

  We took Shira to the boarding school at Sde Boker.

  Her suitcases were in the trunk and she was in the backseat with her earbuds. I couldn’t catch a glimpse of her face in the rearview mirror. But I kept trying.

  Dikla and I were silent. We both knew that every sentence spoken now might be interpreted as an accusation.

  I remembered our drive from the maternity hospital, sixteen years ago. It was pouring. I drove slowly, people honked. I didn’t care. In the backseat—our first daughter, wrapped in a blanket. So small. The rain stopped when we reached our street. The wipers kept working. We sat in the car for a few seconds. We didn’t speak.

  We had the feeling that when we stepped out of the car, we would be stepping into a totally different life.

  Of Shira’s first year, I remember only her. Writing didn’t interest me. Teaching didn’t interest me. I wanted to be her father all the time. And she wanted to be my daughter. She wanted to be held in my arms. On my shoulders. She wanted to be hugged. Kissed. Rocked. When she was a bit older, she used to clutch my waist in desperation when I went to work and ran to me when I came home as if we hadn’t seen each other for a week. She would put her small hand in my large one even if we were only going from the living room to the kitchen. I told people: From the day she was born I stopped being sad. I told myself: The wandering is over. Until a few years ago, along with the high-speed metamorphosis from little girl to teenager, she began to cut herself off from me. All at once, there were no more words of love. Or hugs. All at once, she didn’t want to talk to me. Spend time with me. Do her homework with me. All at once, she had this enormous anger about a list of wrongs committed against her, first and foremost among them that we judge her all the time and don’t accept her as she is. Welcome to adolescence, people with experience nodded at me sympathetically. But I went through several years feeling like a man who had been tossed away. And then, just as the storm was dying down a bit and she was even doing better in school, she told us that she wanted to register in Sde Boker for high school. A residential high school in the desert. Apparently without our knowledge, she had already attended their open house, where she met a few girls she clicked with immediately.

  We drove down there, Dikla and I, to Sde Boker. To have a look around. I hoped we’d be disappointed. But at the end of our visit, I had to admit to myself and to Dikla that I completely understood what Shira saw in the place. Open spaces. The feeling there is t
hat it’s all open spaces. Totally unlike her high school here, which looks like a prison and treats its students like prisoners. Besides, the latest graduating class had written quotes from Meir Ariel songs on the walls of the dormitories as a parting gift. How can you not like a place that welcomes you with “And it’s all about drinking something cold in the middle of the desert”?

  When we came back from Sde Boker, we sat on the balcony to talk. I mean, she and Dikla talked and I mostly listened and thought: How beautifully she expresses herself. And how smart she is. And why haven’t we been able to gain her trust?

  Later, Dikla went to bed and only I, my daughter, and the mosquitoes remained.

  So what do you say, Dad? she asked.

  I wanted to tell her that it was too soon for me. I wanted to tell her that we had stopped arguing only a few months ago and I wanted to enjoy this golden age a bit more before she went. I wanted to tell her that we hadn’t been careful enough with her and that I was sorry.

  But instead, I said: I trust you, little girl. If you feel you’d be happier there—go for it.

  Thank you, Daddy, she said. And for the first time in four years, she hugged me.

  A quick hug. Hesitant. Reserved.

  * * *

  I drove to Sde Boker slowly.

  Dikla was engrossed in her phone, texting busily to someone.

  Shira fell asleep. Or pretended to be asleep. Which dealt a death blow to any chance I could catch a glimpse of her face.