“What did you study?”
“Archaeology, and then accountancy. I specialised in international tax laws,” happiness and satisfaction resonating in my words.
“You always wanted to do archaeology,” he says, and I grin to myself.
“I saw you a few years ago, you didn’t say hello.”
“Where? When?” I’m surprised.
“On a bus. A number nine. Almost ten years ago.”
“It wasn’t me, it couldn’t have been.”
“It was you, you were wearing a dress.”
“Well, then, it certainly couldn’t have been me, I never wear dresses.”
“I think it was you, your plait, I saw your plait. And you didn’t say hello to me.”
“If it was me then obviously I didn’t see you,” I answered.
We toss around a few more sentences. I’ve caught him in his car, he’s just parking outside his parents’ home, not far from my parents’. Yes, they’re still living there, he smiles. I remember the house, his childhood home, a side street thick with shrubbery in the old neighbourhood of Neve Sha’anan. He usually goes to visit them on Fridays around midday, to help out. Then, late in the afternoon, he returns to his home on the rural outskirts of the city, overlooking the bay. An amazing view, he says, and falls silent. A slight pause.
“I’ve been thinking of calling you for some years now,” I say to him, “and I thought that if I didn’t do it now, on your birthday, then… well, then I’m useless.” He’s silent. We’re coming to the end of the conversation. Just before we hang up, I summon up the courage to say – “You can call if you like.” A pause. “And if you like,” I manage to blurt out with my last shred of courage, “we could meet up for a coffee.” I take a breath. The words have been said, they can’t be taken back. He’s silent. We’re preparing to part. And then, a total surprise. Words that come out of nowhere.
“Your green eyes have stayed with me all these years.”
I smile, bashful. “That’s more or less the only thing that hasn’t changed,” I say modestly, a smile washing over my heart.
I’ve spoken with Yaron. Yaron, he exists, he’s alive. It was him, he spoke with me. I get home, stumble into our room. I fall onto the bed, my limbs drained of energy. Friday, afternoon. We rest, as we always do. We hold hands, as we always do. Fresh cups of coffee, one on each side of the bed. Soft music on the radio, as always. But it’s not a regular Friday.
“Today I did something I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” I say, leading up to it, preparing Uri.
He’s silent, waiting for what’s to come. His hand in mine.
“I phoned Yaron.” Excitement seeps from my voice.
The evening passes. The night too. An entire Saturday goes by. And another night. I think back to our conversation. His voice, which I didn’t recognize. It can’t be that he saw me then, ten years ago. It must have been someone else. Wonderingly, I recall the last words he said. The compliment caresses my heart.
Will he call? I might not hear from him again.
2. Yaron
February 11
How could twenty-eight years vanish just like that? I can’t calm down after her phone call, three days have already passed and I just can’t take it in that she suddenly landed on me like that, out of the blue. When Hagar isn’t around I take out my mobile from my pocket, look at her number. I saved it in the memory under the first letter, “A.” And then I play around a bit with the mobile, there’s the list of calls, scrolling backward, the eighth of February, 14:40. An incoming call, fourteen minutes. From – “A.” I somehow can’t put her name into the memory of the mobile. I don’t know why, it’s like some kind of secret. We used to play with our letters so often, A, Y. We used to draw the sign that we’d put on our door, Living happily here are… I once drew her a heart, and then inside it I wrote our names. “Heavens, Yaron, that’s way too childish,” she said. Then I suggested something else, a painting of waves, in the middle there would be our names “Aya and Yaron Gal[2].” “Waves wouldn’t be good,” she said, “Making waves means that there isn’t peace, that we’re quarrelling.” “So what if we quarrel sometimes, it’s not that we don’t love one another,” I’d tell her. “I don’t want us to quarrel. When we are really, really together, I’d like us never to quarrel.” Then I would have to explain to her, “Aya, there’s no such thing, everyone quarrels sometimes, even after they marry,” and she would get into her stubborn mood, always a little stubborn, “How can you say that, Yaron? We aren’t like everyone else.” It’s strange how all this suddenly came back to me now, for years I haven’t given a thought to that sign on the door.
Imagine this landing on you suddenly because you’ve turned fifty. I don’t have a problem with age. I’ve got used to my unusually white hair. Even when Iddo was born my hair was already a little grey. Women make a big thing about their age, like Hagar’s fortieth. It took her months to get used to the idea. She’s already forty-four and to this day she still hasn’t quite got used to it. Sometimes she hides her age, or says thirty-eight, people always believe her. Now, all this falling on me because I’m fifty. Aya remembered the date, spot on. I was shocked when she said on the phone, “It’s Aya.” Back then, when she disappeared on me, simply vanished, I couldn’t forgive her for years, I could never understand how anyone could up and leave what we had, the kind of thing that God sends you but once in a lifetime. Over and over, it must have been a thousand times, I kept asking myself why we had actually parted. So what if we used to quarrel now and then, so what? And the times we would make up, I’ll never forget those as long as I live. That’s how it is when your body is that young, as if there’s no room inside you for all those hormones. When she phoned, life just stopped, like a screech of brakes. What an effort it is now to go on with everything as normal. And Hagar is planning a party for me, “Just tell me who you’d like to invite, Yaron, and I’ll do it all.” Who do I want to invite, Hagar? If you only knew.
An accountant, an international high-tech company. Responsible for the branches in Europe and Central Asia, occasionally travels. “On the flight it’s as if you’re in no place, floating,” she smiled. “And time seems to move both backward and forward for you.”
“Alone—you go alone?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied, I knew she was smiling. “Well, usually alone. Sometimes Uri comes along, though he doesn’t really like leaving his work for too long.” Her Uri takes care of street gang kids, he studied social work. And then she added, “You can’t believe how important his work is.” I kept quiet. But a moment later I said, “Your work must also be important.” “No, not at all. My work, when all’s said and done, consists of making money for people who have it pouring out of their ears anyway,” she said, yet I couldn’t detect any bitterness in her voice. An accountant, I can’t even imagine it. Even though she always loved numbers. And calculations. But back then she wanted to be an archaeologist, it was so like her. We’d sometimes lie, picturing our future, on the grass in the grove behind our neighbourhood, and afterwards, when she was a soldier, under the eucalyptus trees in the kibbutz.[3] “I’ll want to be out doing fieldwork, digging, working on excavations, real excavations where you can actually discover history with your own hands. Do you think that I can, Roni?” “Of course, Aya’le, why not?” I told her, “You can do anything you set your heart on.” Once, at the army base, during sentry duty, when I was still doing my Basic Training, and it beats me how I had the courage to do something like this, I sat myself down outside the little sentry post, under a light, took out a sheet of paper and drew her. It could have cost me a month’s privileges. “You want to know how you’ll look when you’re grown up? Here you are, I’ve drawn you,” I wrote that to her in a letter I sent with the drawing. There she was, in a few more years: combat pants with lots of pockets, a khaki shirt with the cuffs folded high, little boots. On an excavation site, her tools scattered next to her. Bending down, holding up some broken vessel, brushing off the soil with her ha
nds, a plait down her back. In my drawings, I always put in her plait.
So what am I doing now? She suggested meeting over a cup of coffee, she actually suggested it, could hardly say it. She hesitated so much, there were these pauses... “If you’d like…” she said. I waited. She was silent. “If I’d like what,” I asked. “Only if you’d like, we don’t have to,” she said again. “I’m listening,” I said, could barely contain myself. Say it Aya, say it, I nearly shouted, what is it you want to say? “If you like, we could meet for a cup of coffee,” came out of her at last. It’s a good thing I didn’t reply, there was nothing I could say that would come out right.
It’s already three days and I haven’t yet called. Twice I almost called, started to dial her number but hung up at the last moment. She must be waiting.
Waiting, and thinking about me. Did she think about me all those years? I always had the feeling that she had completely crossed me out. Crossed us out.
She must be thinking now.
Perhaps remembering too.
But she won’t wait that long. And she won’t call again.
3. Aya
Tuesday. Four days have passed, time seems to crawl. Not a moment goes by when I don’t check my mobile phone – that there’s a signal, that it’s not on silent, that the battery hasn’t run out. “Would you please try to calm down Aya, what’s with you and that phone of yours?” Uri said yesterday, he knows I’m on edge.
Maybe Yaron doesn’t want to. He was completely floored when I phoned. Good thing that I caught him alone. Not that he shouldn’t tell her, but it’s hard to know how she would react. I hope she won’t make a big deal out of it. It’s hard to know what she might start thinking, how can she feel certain that I’m not trying to start something.
Maybe he told her and she doesn’t really like it. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t called.
He must have decided not to.
What does that mean?
I can’t call him again.
What’s the problem with it, what’s with her? Just to meet, to say hello, for us to see one another. It’s so strange that we haven’t met up all these years. Who could have believed back then that we wouldn’t see each other for twenty-eight years.
If Uri and I hadn’t gone away to study in Jerusalem, perhaps I would have run into Yaron from time to time in Haifa, bumped into him. His parents still live in the same house, so how come we didn’t run into one another all these years, just by chance? I should have asked him why he didn’t come to the school reunion; that completely slipped my mind when we spoke. Now it’s too late. I can’t call again.
What does it mean?
Does it mean we’ll never see one another again?
Am I never going to hear his voice again - never?
Maybe the last time that we saw one another was then, twenty-eight years ago.
How do I make peace with this?
When you don’t think too much about things, then everything’s all right. All your problems begin when you start thinking too much. People were always telling me that.
4. Yaron
All the drive to Caesarea I thought about what would happen, how it would feel to see her, how she would look. Aya at forty-eight, unbelievable. For years she’s been twenty in my mind, never budging from age twenty. What a girl she was. I remember everything, her shorts, her blue sandals with a loop over the big toe which she would toss off her feet in a second, her plait. We would walk along the seashore for hours, holding hands, embracing. Everything is so deeply stamped in me, like those fossils that she used to collect. “Look Roni, see here,” and she’d show me, turning it all over, all the facets, “a lump of soil that retains a memory.” That’s what she used to say about her collection of fossils. I wanted to ask her to send me a picture, didn’t have the nerve. To ask Aya for a picture, how could I, wouldn’t it sound like a sort of blind date? It took me almost a week to call her back, I don’t understand why. Maybe I was afraid, I didn’t want to lose the image in my mind. Yet as soon as she called I knew that I would see her. I had to, simply had to. Impossible to pass up something like this, I’d never forgive myself. But why not, actually? It was she who phoned, she who suggested it, so why shouldn’t I meet up with her? I think she was happy to hear me. “So we’re meeting, Yaron?” And then she wanted a quiet place, really quiet, “so we won’t be disturbed.” And in the end she suggested, “What do you think about Caesarea? There’s this small hotel, we could meet in the lobby.” I couldn’t believe it, I thought I wasn’t hearing right. “In the lobby, you said?” “Yes, I’ll explain how to get there, all right?” All right, Aya, all right, don’t you know that even if you’d said the end of the Earth it would have been all right?
I didn’t sleep for three days, luckily Hagar didn’t really notice, and the whole way there I tried to imagine what would happen, how it would be, and what if I didn’t even recognize her? And what would happen after… it’s impossible to even consider that now. When I got to the Caesarea coastline, from the traffic lights I started looking out for her, the lights changed and I turned left as she had explained. Right away I could see her, another hundred meters to go, a hundred meters and time stood still, she was standing there on the pavement, that same way of standing like thousands of years ago when I’d come home from the army, as if all those years in between had never been. And when I drew near, her smile, that green in her eyes, that green, exactly as I remembered, “Where did you park?” I asked. She turned her head towards the coarse gravel, not uttering a word. I parked the car, got out, started to walk, that’s Aya, God, she’s waiting for me. I wanted to walk slowly, to feel, to think. Within a moment I had reached her, there she was, barely changed, even her figure had not really changed, jeans, a white sweater, her hair swept up and back, a fringe screening her eyes a little, the same eyes, exactly, that small birthmark above her right cheek, how could I have forgotten that birthmark? “Hi Aya,” I smiled at her. “Hi,” it scarcely came out of her. I brushed her cheek with a light kiss, she didn’t return it, she was frozen, hardly moved, we didn’t embrace. Maybe it’s good that we didn’t embrace, what if I hadn’t been able to hold back, stop myself from hugging her, breathing in her scent again, that fresh lemon scent of hers that’s stayed with me all these years, does she still have it, I don’t know, I couldn’t tell, she was so remote. We started to go inside, into the lobby of the hotel, walking, not talking, she had one hand jammed into the pocket of her jeans, in the other hand she held her keys, tight, her fingers white as that flimsy sweater of hers, those fingers that used to touch me. And then I sat facing her, it’s Aya, how could it be? Now she’s a woman, with women’s stuff - handbag, shoes, keys. And she’s also a mother, unimaginable. She was pregnant, Aya pregnant, and by him. How could it be that she also called her son Iddo, is he at all like our Iddo, how was it for her to give birth to him, what kind of boy is Aya’s Iddo? And if everything had been different, what would have happened, what kind of Iddo would have been born? And she has a girl, I can’t imagine it, what does her girl look like, I don’t dare to ask for a picture, and what will her girl look like in a few years’ time… where am I going with all this? And Aya herself, full of life, that beauty of hers, she still has it. I just knew that this was how she would be, I always knew, even then. “What, what was it you knew back then?” she asked, I hardly heard the words. “What, Yaron, tell me, what was it you always knew?” Something between a whisper and an exclamation came out of her. I kept silent, how could I tell her that she was blooming, that I simply knew that that’s how she would be. She sat there, all stirred up, the words choked up in her, she wanted me to talk, me to tell, tell her things. “What should I tell you, Aya, what would you like to hear?” I asked. “Everything, I want to hear everything, what you’ve been through all these years.” She herself could barely get a sound out of her mouth, her hands wedged tight under her legs, she asked for a glass of water but didn’t touch it. I nudged the glass nearer to her on the table, “Drink,” I ur
ged her, “you’d better take a drink, I don’t want you fainting on me.” I don’t understand what’s going on, she’s happy with Uri, that’s what she says. “Nice,” I said, “happy to hear it,” and I smiled into that greenness of her eyes. “Yes, totally,” she said and suddenly broke off, as she blushed the birthmark on her cheek stood out more, it once used to bother me, I have no idea why it used to bother me, it actually suits her. She sat there, not moving, blushing, can just anyone make her blush like that? If she’s so happy why does she hardly say it? And what does it mean to be happy after twenty-eight years? What – don’t they ever argue? What about the routine, the daily grind that wears everyone down? So why did she want to meet? In the end, at the very last moment, before we parted, I finally managed to ask, “Tell me, Aya, why did you call, has something happened?” “No, of course not, it’s got nothing to do with it,” she replied, her tone rising somewhat. “But why now?” I asked again. And I waited, she didn’t speak. “Why now?” I repeated, I couldn’t help it. “Surely there must be a reason why now of all times.” “No reason,” she threw out, a little angrily. And she went on sitting there, silent, her hands thrust firmly under her legs, her eyes fixed on her knees. I looked at her, the Aya-of-then. She was my Aya then, that’s what I used to call her, Aya’le, Ayush, all those names that I had for her, it would take me hours to travel to her, on buses, hitchhiking, just to see her, even for an hour. I knew her whole body, and she knew mine, all of it, those fingers of hers, what am I doing, what should I be doing with myself now. And Hagar, what about Hagar? I have to get up, I should be going, I must think, I have to think. But she went on sitting there, nailed to that couch, not able to take out her hands from under her legs, not able to move. And then suddenly she said, ever so quietly, as if to herself, I could hardly hear, “What a mistake this is, what a mistake. I should have done it ages ago, ages.” And then she said, “We live these lives, rushing around, scarcely noticing a thing,” I could barely make out the words. And eventually, when she got up, she suddenly said to me, “Yaron, do me a favour, tell Hagar. I never thought you wouldn’t tell her.” I didn’t reply. I don’t understand how she told Uri. And how does she think I could tell Hagar, is she naïve or what? Over the years, there were other relationships here and there, platonic, never anything serious; Hagar had barely coped even with those. All those rows we had over nothing at all. So now Aya, of all women - tell Hagar about her, what for? Nothing good could come of it. How could Aya not understand this?
So We Said Goodbye: A Contemporary Fiction Novel Page 2