by Eshkol Nevo
Then explain it to me.
I don’t know anymore…how to be with him. Not only with him. In general, I don’t know how to be in the world anymore. With Dikla too. Instead of telling her that I feel her slipping away from me, I made up a story I thought would bring her back to me. But it pushed her even farther away.
I understand.
Do you have a tissue? Isn’t a psychologist supposed to have a box of tissues on her desk?
I have one.
Thank you, Dikla.
Thanks, Dikla. Sorry I’m like this, Ms. Psychologist.
It’s all right. And my name is Ayala.
It’s that kind of time.
I understand.
No, you don’t.
Then explain it to me.
Everything…everything’s falling apart. Tell me, am I the only one that saxophone is driving crazy? Sorry for nagging, but it sounds really close…is someone in the house playing the saxophone now?
To be honest, yes. My son. He’s practicing.
To tell the truth, he’s not bad at all.
Thank you.
It’s not a compliment for you, it’s a compliment for him.
I’ll pass it on to him. Can I ask how old you are?
Me? Forty-two. Ah…three.
That’s…age-appropriate.
What is?
That feeling that everything is destabilizing. Many people suffer from it at your age.
You know, that’s exactly why I stopped studying psychology. What you just did is inexcusable.
What did I do?
You put my personal experience into a paradigm. It’s offensive. It makes me feel like a statistic.
I’m sorry you feel that way. It wasn’t intentional.
So what was your intention?
I believe that—
Tell me, can your son hear our conversation?
Of course not, he has no way of—
Because when I started to get angry at you, his playing got livelier. As if he were creating a suitable soundtrack.
It’s purely accidental.
Let’s say.
In any case, what I wanted to say is that the realization that we are not as unique as we think we are, that other people experience similar difficulties—similar, not identical—to ours, that realization can be liberating. Can perhaps even inspire us to change.
Inspire us? In what way?
I would like to remind you how we ended up having this discussion. I asked you whether you could change your routine and tell Yanai fewer stories, and you replied that you’re no longer sure you know how to experience the world directly, without the intermediary of stories, right?
More or less.
When I look at the life stories of my patients, I often find that yours is the age when they are at a turning point. Amid the crisis and uncertainty, people begin again. Differently. You can find other ways to reach Yanai. There are other things you can do together as father and son. There is an opportunity here.
I’m crazy about the kid. I want him to be happy. I want him to not be lonely and sad the way I was as a child.
That’s clear to me. It’s clear to all of us here in the room.
Have you noticed that the saxophone sounds melancholy again? I advise you very strongly to check whether your son hasn’t somehow found a way to eavesdrop on what’s going on in this room.
I suggest you concentrate on your son. Both of you. Dikla, you’ve been rather quiet during our conversation, and I ask myself, that is, I wonder where it touches you, this discussion.
In a slightly different place.
Meaning?
Meaning, I’m not sure that the fact that he tells Yanai stories is the source of the boy’s problem. It feels a bit superficial. Even dishonest.
Dishonest?
Patients also lie to their psychologists, don’t they? Tell a story in which they’re the bad guy to hide a story in which they’re even worse.
I understand.
No you don’t. Our daughter has already run away from us to a boarding school. And with the situation at home this last year…it’s no wonder that another child of ours runs away into his imagination. How did you put it? That he uses “age-appropriate methods to bypass or deny the difficulties that reality poses for him.” It’s exactly that.
Can you give details?
What’s the point? Whatever I tell you will be my manipulative version of reality. That’s why I stopped believing in verbal therapy. I do water therapy. Once every two weeks. Gaia, my therapist, and I barely exchange a word, but my body tells her everything.
So what are you saying, Dikla, that’s the reason you don’t sleep with me?
I don’t think this is the time or the place to—
It never is the time or the place—
I’m stopping you.
Why do you keep stopping us? Shouldn’t it be the opposite, that the psychologist frees us from our inhibitions?
Perhaps, but our time is up, friends. We’ll let the things that have been said here sink in. I would like to remind you that next week, I’m meeting with Yanai. Would you like to pay by check or bank transfer?
* * *
—
That’s not what the psychologist said at the end.
Or before the end.
I can’t tell the story of that session—or other events that took place in my life last year—the way they really happened. And yet—
Once out of the psychologist’s building, we stopped for a moment, adjusting to being in the street. We were supposed to go our own ways—I to pick up the kids, Dikla to work. But then Dikla said, I feel like ice cream.
I think there’s a good ice-cream parlor on the corner.
We walked there together, close, but not touching. We pretended to be undecided about the flavors we wanted. Until she chose tiramisu in a cup and I French vanilla in a cone. I didn’t have to say “Do you remember when…” because I was sure that we both remembered when. That we both understood we were reliving a moment that had occurred at the very beginning of our relationship. A true moment, not the ones I’ve scattered throughout this interview to protect her privacy—
Her mother had died suddenly. A heart attack. A little while after we started dating. On the fifth day of the seven days of mourning, I drove to Ma’alot.
I wasn’t sure whether she was even into me. Or whether, after a few dates, I should go to the shivah.
The house was filled with people who had come to pay their respects. She was sitting in a separate room, wearing jeans and a Bart Simpson sweatshirt. I bent down and hugged her, and she hugged me back, limply. There was no place to sit next to her, so I sat down at the far end of the room. Her friends kept coming in. I didn’t know she had so many friends. The girls cried on her shoulder. The boys all seemed to be secretly in love with her. I didn’t know what to do or say. I couldn’t even recognize her in the photo albums that were passed from hand to hand. From a few things she had mentioned casually during our two dates, such as the fact that her father was the chef in all the factories owned by Stef Wertheimer, and that the food he cooked at home was incredibly delicious, I had gathered that she was more of a daddy’s girl. But I wasn’t sure.
After about an hour, I stood up to go. At the front door, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Thanks for coming, she said. And then she shook my hand, a long, lingering handshake that allowed her to place a slip of paper in my palm.
I was in the car before I had the courage to open it.
Drive to the end of the block.
Wait for me at the monument.
I’ll find an excuse and go there.
Half an hour later, she finally appeared. Riding a bike that had a little girl’s seat.
My heart went out to her. Maybe because she pedaled so slowly. S
o mournfully. Her pedaling was mournful.
Maybe because the wind tousled her hair.
Suddenly, I could imagine her at seven years old, at ten, a miniature of herself, a lonely kind of child. Riding her bike with no one at her side.
She reached the monument, swung an extremely long leg over the crossbar, leaned the bike against the structure without chaining it, and turned to me. She was breathing hard, her chest rising and falling, as we moved closer to each other. I didn’t know if it was because of the bike riding or me. She was still so unknown to me. I had no idea whether I could hug her then. If I was allowed. She stood on tiptoe and kissed me—a quick kiss, on the corner of my mouth—and said, I feel like ice cream. It turned out that there was an ice-cream parlor in Nahariya called Penguin that she and her mother used to go to when she was a kid. It’s not a little too far, Nahariya? I asked. A little, she said, but I need some air. We got there in less than twenty minutes. We barely spoke on the way, apparently words were more than she could manage. She ordered two scoops of tiramisu and I ordered one scoop of French vanilla. We stood on the street, in front of the ice-cream parlor and licked our ice cream. I took small, careful licks, and she—almost full bites. Her tongue moved quickly, greedily, shaving off one side of the cone, then switching right over to the other side.
When we finished, she asked me to take her back to her bike.
During the drive, my hand rested in hers, and when we reached the monument and got out of the car, I thought she would go straight to her bike, but then she came around the car to where I was standing and hugged me tightly for a very long time. I had never before hugged a girl who was exactly my height. I felt how every spot on my body had a sister spot on hers. Everything touched. It made me press her even closer to me. When we finally moved apart, she asked if I could come again tomorrow. I said yes. Of course. At that moment, I would have done whatever she asked me to do.
* * *
—
We hugged after the psychologist too. We finished our ice cream and, without saying a word, turned to each other all at once and hugged. Tightly. For a very long time. At that moment, I would have done whatever she asked me to do—but she didn’t ask me to do anything.
Do you believe that literature still has an influence in our world?
He walked beside me from the minute I left the auditorium. At first, I didn’t notice. I was busy beating myself up about a few insipid remarks I’d made during the meeting, trying too hard to be liked. Then, when I noticed him, I thought he was walking with me because he needed to go in the same direction. When I stepped out of the school gate and he followed me, I began to realize that he was sticking close to me intentionally, like a bodyguard.
Did you want to ask me something? I asked, stopping and turning to him.
He choked. He must have thought we would walk in silence.
I studied him. A short boy. Short even relative to that age when boys come up to the waists of the girls in their class. Black hair clipped short. Thick eyebrows. And something foreign in his face. Not from here.
I write stories too, he said, looking left and right.
Great, I said. It’s wonderful that you write.
I wanted to know something, he said, looking left and right again.
Yes?
But let’s keep walking, he said. I can ask you while we walk.
I thought it was a bit strange, his insistence that we keep walking. But I couldn’t find a reason to refuse. So we began to walk again, I taking long steps in my black leather shoes, and he taking small ones in his dirty white sneakers, trying to keep as close to me as he could.
So what do you want to know? I asked when I saw that he was silent again.
I wanted to ask, he said, how to create the end of a story. I mean, there are a lot of beginnings in the stories I write…but I never manage to end them.
What’s your name?
Yehuda.
Look, Yehuda. There are several kinds of endings, I told him. And the end is really very important, because it gives meaning to the story, and that’s why endings are so hard. They’re hard for everyone who writes, not only for you. I talked and talked, very passionately, until I realized he wasn’t listening. His eyes were searching frantically for something I couldn’t see.
I stopped talking.
We kept walking down the long path from the school gate to the parking lot. Tall bushes grew wild on both sides of the path. Suddenly a vague sense ran through me, like chills, that someone was watching us through them, but I dismissed it.
Tell me, Yehuda asked quickly, as if he were trying to get rid of the words, when you write, do you decide on the subject of the story in advance?
My suspicion, that he wasn’t really interested in a reply, grew stronger. That question had already been asked during the meeting with the students, so why was he asking it again? I answered anyway. On the slim chance that it really was important to him. I told him that in stories, as opposed to essays, there is no real subject, it’s more like a question that preoccupies the writer, and sometimes, while he’s writing, that question turns into a different question, and he doesn’t usually get answers.
Yehuda didn’t even bother to mumble ah-ha. Or nod. He just didn’t listen. His eyes were focused on the bushes, and then on the large dumpster we were passing.
We kept walking in silence. His shoelaces became untied, but he didn’t stop to retie them. His shoulders were hunched, his hands clenched into fists, and he bit his lower lip hard. As if he’s preparing for something, I thought.
When we reached the car, he stopped and said—avoiding my eyes—Thank you.
You’re welcome, I said, and before he started to leave, I said: Wait.
He put his hands on his hips. And his gaze on his shoes.
Now I have a question, I said.
A question? His thick eyebrows rose in puzzlement.
Yes. I want you to explain why you walked with me. You’re not really interested in my answers, so why did you ask all those questions?
No reason, he said.
I don’t think it was for no reason.
You don’t want to know.
But I do, I said. And thought that there was something too knowing about the phrase “You don’t want to know.” Too bitter for a boy.
They…bully me, he said quickly.
Who?
A gang of kids. From the ninth grade. They wait for me in the bushes. Every day after school, he said. I remembered our walk and his frantic eyes.
Are you the only one they bully?
Yes.
What do they want from you?
I don’t know. Once, at recess, I looked at one of them and he told me not to look at him like a faggot, and that’s when it started.
What do they do to you?
They drag me into the bushes and hit me.
And what do you do?
At first, I tried to hit them back, but now I lie on the ground and wait for them to get tired of it.
I leaned on the car and took a deep, heavy breath. I surveyed the bushes in the hope of seeing one of the bullies. Those chickenshits. Taking advantage of someone weaker than them. I could feel my anger rising, and I clenched my fists.
Tell me, does your dad know about this?
My dad doesn’t live with us.
And your mom? She can’t come to pick you up?
She works.
Do you have older brothers?
I’m the oldest.
And the principal, she knows the whole story?
Yehuda looked up at me and chuckled. She knows, but she’s afraid to say anything. So she won’t get a chair smashed on her head, like the last one did.
So what can be done? I asked him, and actually, myself.
Nothing. In the end, they’ll get tired of it and move on to another kid.
I thought again of one of the trying-to-be-wise remarks I’d made at the meeting. “Someone who writes stories does not have the privilege of being hopeless. He has to believe that things can be changed, because there is no story without change.”
But wait a minute, I said angrily. It isn’t possible that nothing can be done about this. What if we go to the principal right now and talk to her?
Yehuda looked at me, disappointed.
I already told you she won’t do anything. And besides, today is Tuesday.
So?
It’s her day off.
Okay, so we’ll go to see her tomorrow, I wanted to say. But I remembered that tomorrow I would be home, far from here.
Yehuda kicked a stray pinecone. It slid along the asphalt until it was caught under the wheels of a car.
Where do you live? I asked.
Why? he replied, looking at me suspiciously.
Will it help if I give you a ride home?
You don’t have to. From here on, it’s all main streets and they won’t do anything to me when there are people around.
You’re sure?
Yes, he said, and bent down to tie his shoelaces. Then he stood up to go.
I didn’t know what else to say. Or do.
Take care of yourself, I called to him, and immediately regretted the words. I mean, that’s what it was all about. He couldn’t.
He kept walking, but after a few meters, he stopped and turned back to me.
I really do write stories, he said. Don’t think I lied to you.
How do you cope with the loneliness involved in writing?
I think I’ve already answered that question. It seems that basic issues tend to keep bothering you.
But if there is a way to escape from the hall of mirrors, it’s to devote yourself totally to others. Or in my case, to teach. To be a teacher.
For three hours, twice a week, I have the opportunity to be with other people and their stories. To listen to them, stimulate their imaginations, help them free themselves and blossom. At this point in my life, it’s my true salvation.
What exactly do you teach in your writing workshop?