A Late Divorce

FRIDAY, FOUR TO FIVE P.M

“I wonder if I should confess that today I actually felt a twinge of impatience to see you. I wasn’t late this time either, did you notice?”

“Of course.”

“Of course… of course… I needn’t have asked. Here I am, I suppose you must be thinking, caught more and more in your net, corked in your test tube, pigeonholed in your file cabinet… and yet, if I may comment in a brief parenthesis, your optimism is premature. How long is it now that I’ve been coming to you? Two or three months… and each time I’ve said to myself, well, this is the last: it’s time to end the game, pay the bill and say goodbye. And apropos the bill, by the way, I haven’t asked you yet what you charge for the right to blabber away here… and for the honor, of course…”

“One thousand five hundred.”

“Not bad… not bad at all… but not unreasonable either. Really not so steep. Some of your colleagues are far more avaricious. I’ll pay the bill, then, and we’ll part amicably. Oh, I’ll pay it, don’t worry about that. That is, I think I will… yes, I believe I may… after all, why shouldn’t I? You deserve it… if only for having controlled yourself and never made me get to the point. But do you really think I can be trusted to pay you?”

“I think you can be.”

“Good for you. Blessed are the faithful. No, don’t be alarmed. You needn’t think that I take your confidence in me as an undiluted compliment. But I will pay you. And after that, we’ll see…. The main thing is to have done this too. To have been through it. Because two people can’t conduct a civilized conversation nowadays without sooner or later broaching the subject of I and My Shrink, or My Shrink and I. With a mysterious smile and a gleam in one’s eye one trades experiences, technical details, fees, descriptions of offices… But broaching it only, mind you. It’s no disgrace to admit it anymore, but there’s still a limit to what can be revealed. And so now I’ll be able to join the fun too with my own little adventure. I too was there. And what I found was part shopworn clichés, part sophisticated jargon and part slightly original rephrasing of old, familiar problems. A fifty-minute beauty treatment for one’s dried-out ego… but harmless. And incapable of causing any harm. With your kind permission, then, I’ll withdraw my previous objections.”

“Then you did have objections?”

“Up to a point. And please rest assured that I’m perfectly aware of what they meant. My friends couldn’t wait to tear into me and explain that any resistance in these matters simply reflects on the resister. I’ve run into that kind of sophistry before… the automatic incorporation of all opposition to a system into the system itself. Oh, it’s very clever… but as I was saying, I’m officially willing to withdraw my objections as a gesture of social good will. I’ve paid good money for the privilege of finding out that the system can’t do any harm… at least not at the hands of the charming young gentleman who has taken me on this brief tour of it… and has been kind enough to listen patiently to a stranger like me without betraying the least sign of boredom… except, of course, for glancing at his watch once or twice during each session. Yes, and who has been so careful not to be provoked by me… is that a smile I detect?”

“Is that another provocation?”

“Perhaps. As you like. But I see that it’s simply water off a duck’s back. You’re an expert at the time-honored technique of returning all questions to the asker for further embellishment. A man who won’t commit himself. Who takes care never to involve himself. (Perhaps, I might add in a small parenthesis, because there isn’t much to involve, eh?) But still… a fair and by no means unintelligent person whom I’ve done my best to entertain. Normality incarnate has listened to me sympathetically, and since it’s offered me a cozy easy chair, a quiet, civilized room and a suitable time… well, then…”

“Suitable? How so?”

“I mean the time of day that you agreed to see me at, Friday afternoon from four to five. Is there a pleasanter one? Tel Aviv has quieted down, the banks are shut, the buses have nearly stopped running, the crowds are gone, there are less women in the streets too… many less. The stores are closed also, though not all of them. Here and there you still can find some old irreligious grocer to sell you a squashed hallah and a liter of milk, or some boutique that goes merrily on selling its flimsy, latest-fashion sport shirts. It’s a time for the nut and flower vendors, their stalls surrounded by the heavy weekend papers piled high on the sidewalks… a lovely in-between time in which the old week is slowly being packed away. What we haven’t managed to do in it will never get done in it now, and the possibilities of the new week don’t seem very pressing yet. Even the stock exchange goes into the deep freeze for forty-five long, intractable hours… and yet it’s still a weekday… a sacred one, though. The sad, stupid Sabbath with its hymns and sermons and long looks hasn’t arrived yet with that oppressive sense that you’re somehow losing out if you don’t do something in a hurry. It’s a time when, rain or shine, I like to cruise the streets of the north side, not far from the sea… to run into the slow singles walking more erectly now because the world suddenly weighs on them less… into the lost souls of all sexes whom life has excused from the compulsory family meal… a most pleasant time to come to see you, and above all, to leave your office at. It came as a great surprise that you agreed to take me at it… in no small measure that’s why I chose you… I’m just curious to know whether I’m the week’s last case or whether you go on working like a beaver right into the Sabbath…”

“Would you like to be the last case?”

“Love to. I’m dying to be the last. I’ve thought several times of hiding behind the stairway to see if anyone came after me, but I didn’t want to involve you in a scandal with the neighbors. Yes, I’d be thrilled to know I was the last… to be able to think that as soon as I walked out of here the door opened and in came your wife sighing, ‘The weekend at last! Is that curly, handsome queer of yours gone? Come, there’s cauliflower for supper!’ ’’

“Cauliflower?”

“I smelled it coming up the stairs. Perhaps she hasn’t told you yet. You’re in for a surprise.”

“Do you like cauliflower?”

“I hate it.”

“And is that really how you think of yourself — a handsome, curly queer?”

“Curly and handsome, in that order. I’m simply stating a fact.”

“Yes. I understand that. I simply wanted to know if that’s how you thought of yourself… if it was your self-image.”

“That’s how others think of me too.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so. Do you doubt it?”

“I was only asking.”

“But what was I saying… you had interrupted me…”

“You were saying that because of the suitable hour, the easy chair, the room…”

“…I kept being drawn back here despite my decision to stop.”

“And these externals are all that… keeps making you come back?”

“The whole atmosphere.”

“Yes. The whole atmosphere. Only that?”

“Of course not only that. You too have been clever enough to leave some loose thread at the end of every session… some nagging question to bait me with. You’ll cut me short in the middle of an idea or even a sentence in order to get me to return… you always make sure to leave some buoy afloat for me above the confusion of the week… which is why I’ve kept forgetting to tender you my resignation…”

“Forgetting?”

“Yes, yes… though I know that there’s no such thing as forgetting in this room… that everything is significant. My tense young brother, you know, claims that all of human history, the whole hideous compendium of human misery, can be reduced to a few simple laws that he intends to discover. And he will discover them, I have no doubt of it… he’ll come up with something. All these significance freaks amuse me no end…. But what did I want to say?”

“You were saying that this time…”

“What about it?”

“…you felt impatient to see me.”

“Righto. Listen, you really do hear and remember everything. You don’t lose track of the thread in my wildest associations. I suppose you’re glad to be told that I’ve become less indifferent toward you, maybe even more dependent.”

“Do you think that I want you to be dependent on me?”

“Why shouldn’t you? It’s natural. I like to attach people to me also — provided, of course, that the attachment can always be broken. There are lots of people who would like to tie me to their apron string too.”

“Such as?”

“There’s a long list of them.”

“Your father, for one…”

“My father? No, he turned me loose long ago. When the string got too tangled for him. Mow he’s trying to steal a page from my book and be a free soul like me. You should have seen him getting off the plane…”

“He’s really here, then?”

“Of course. Why shouldn’t he be? A reconditioned father with a brand-new style. Youthful movements, a floppy, offbeat hat, even a snappy-looking valise. What else? Oh, yes, a long mane of hair in the back and color-coordinated clothing that some young lady must have picked out for him. My sister and brother-in-law were waiting for him in the terminal, but I had gone up to the observation deck to get a bird’s-eye view… to see this sixty-four-year-old psychosexual renovation job step out on Israeli soil and take his first gulp of its humid, gray evening air… and above all, to watch him put on his self-pitying mask before passport control… our poor murder victim…”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

“It was nothing.”

“Didn’t you add something under your breath at the end? I didn’t hear it.”

“No, nothing… I was just…’’

“But you did say something?”

“It’s not important.”

“Does he make you angry?”

“Not in the least. You’re barking up the wrong tree, come down from it….Do I sound angry to you? You’re missing the whole point about my relationship with him. He simply doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

“I had thought that was the reason for your impatience today… that you wanted to talk about him…”

“But why? You’ve got your preconceived theories and you have to fit me into them. Father-son relations, oedipal conflicts, primal entanglements… I’m sorry to have to spoil it all for you…”

“Last session you didn’t stop talking about him. You were very tense about his coming.”

“Maybe I was. I wouldn’t deny it. But it turns out to have been wasted emotion. As far as I’m concerned, his visit hasn’t even begun yet…”

“In what sense?”

“In the sense that almost a week has gone by without our seeing each other. There was a typical, sentimental Kaminkean moment when he came through customs into the night. We hugged each other hard… somewhat harder than I had counted on… we even had tears in our eyes, although the real crying was courtesy of my sister. She’s been the family’s fount of tears ever since childhood. Her lawyerman stood smiling off to one side — I don’t believe he even has tear glands…. But all this happened very quickly. It had begun to drizzle too. At which point, in the middle of all the suitcases and the packages and the small talk about the flight and the meals and the not having slept, a new leitmotiv emerged: his resemblance to me and mine to him. The three years that had gone by had apparently closed the physical gap between us. I had matured a bit… perhaps grown slightly stooped… my head had a more profound tilt to it… while he’d lost weight, let his curls grow out, and adopted this youthful style. Maybe I had even served as his model from afar. In short, there were his and my genes showing through at last with a smile of mutual recognition. The lawyerman couldn’t get over it. All he kept saying was ‘Wow! I never knew the two of you looked so alike!’ ”

“Did that upset you?”

“Not exactly. But it was a good reason to be glad that we soon split up. They took him up north with them right away. After all, there’s a reason for this rushed trip of his: the long-promised divorce… the legal termination of their hundred-year war…”

“And has it gone through already?”

“Next Sunday, God willing… or more precisely, God able. But I’m not at all sure that He will be able, because so far there’s been nothing but disasters. They’ve been going about it in the most ass-backwards, roundabout way, making every possible mistake. To begin with, instead of going straight to her by himself, even on that first night, throwing himself at her feet and declaring, ‘Here I am, you summoned me… forgive me… I’m unworthy of you… it’s I who have been the true madman… he went and fell into a gargantuan slumber in my sister’s house. For a whole day. After which he sent that comical lawyerman to get her to sign the agreement. I warned them on the phone not to let that joker go alone because he would screw up everything, but he insisted on it, and came back that evening totally befuddled. She had made a complete fool of him…. Then on Tuesday, still instead of seeing her by himself and confessing, ‘Here I am… I’ve come… you’re too good for me… you can have the apartment… I’m in a terrible mess over there… have mercy on me…,’ he made a pilgrimage to the Holy City in order to solicit moral support from my younger brother and his new wife — a romantic type with literary delusions whom father had never met, since he never bothered to come to their wedding. What better time to make amends for having missed it? So he slept over with them and finally, on Wednesday, organized a whole delegation to visit my mother — my brother and my sister and my brother-in-law… they even dragged along their small son. All to soften the blow of having to face her…”

“You didn’t go too?”

“Absolutely not. The thespian art is not for me — and if I must indulge in it, then only in solo appearances. Because it was real theater up there. There was a formal reception, mother had even baked a cake for it, the patients mobbed them, our old dog recognized father and jumped on him so rapturously that he knocked him head over heels…. A gay time was had by all.”

“What dog is that?”

“I never told you about him? We had this big, strange, cunning, perverted dog with wild reddish hair and big floppy ears. A mongrel — one-quarter bulldog, one-quarter German shepherd and one-half God only knows what. I used to call him Halves-’n’-Quarters, but mother and Asi called him Horatio and father shortened it to ’Ratio… a personality in his own right, whom we sent with mother to the hospital to romp on the lawns and eat the lunatics’ leftovers. To make a long story short, he too played a part in the production. My brother had an attack of hysteria and began screaming at my mother and hitting himself… my sister tearfully implored her… but she still wouldn’t sign. So on Thursday my father went back again, this time by himself. He’d finally grasped what he should have understood long ago… that is, that if he wants his freedom he has to let her have the whole apartment. It’s just his hard luck that she’s suddenly in her right mind again and getting lighter by the minute. He didn’t get back to Haifa until last night… this morning he went to see some lawyer friend in Tel Aviv in order to draw up a new agreement. Tomorrow he’ll go back to Haifa. On Sunday, if all goes well, they’ll get divorced, and Monday night he’s jetting back…. No, this time I’m under no pressure. It’s a casual visit for me. I’m just a spectator. Ya’el and Asi are the official liquidators. I’ve already done my share. All those last years alone with them in the house… I’ve already told you about them. To have had to be the defendant, the prosecutor, the witness, the judge and the bailiff, all in turn… so that this time I’ve kept out of the way… on the sidelines. Did I really talk about him so much in our last session? I don’t recall…”

“Yes.”

“I must have been nervous about his visit. I could still taste the last time he’d been here three years ago, a year and a half after he first left us. He came and moved in with me for a whole month then, a sick, confused, guilt-ridden man tom between two worlds… the haunted murder victim returning to the scene of the crime… drawn back to all his and her things, to his own bed and home, but scared stiff by the lurid memory. He would get me out of bed in the middle of the night to sob all over me. He couldn’t be left alone for a minute — I began to worry that he would never go back to America…. And so this time I was afraid of a repeat performance, even though his most recent letters had had a different tone. He had found a woman there, a job, something to do with his life. He was always a terrible square, and yet apparently he had managed to work on himself a bit…. Yet who would have thought that he would traipse back and forth in a trance for a whole week between Haifa and Jerusalem without stopping off even once in his beloved Tel Aviv…? Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you. You were hoping that he would deluge me with pressures and shower new conflicts on our reunion. Didn’t I warn you in our first meeting that I won’t play the neurotic sufferer for you? I told you the whole story of my parents right away so as to clear the table of it… to make you realize that I had nothing to hide and that you needn’t waste your time digging up ancient history. I didn’t come to you with any problems. I came to understand.”

“To understand what?”

“The subtle power that I have over people. I want to see myself more clearly in order to be stronger and put my deviancy to work for me. You can’t make me feel bad about myself… the normality that you’re preaching isn’t for me…”

“You think that I’m preaching normality?”

“All the time. Covertly, of course. You’ve been smart enough to avoid a frontal attack. Which doesn’t mean you won’t launch one yet… because you still don’t know the worst of it… sex for sale, the atrocious nexus of pleasure and money… only by then you won’t be able to mount your self-righteous high horse and denounce me in the name of your social norms, because I’ll already be waving goodbye to you from the other side of the door…”

“Is it important to you that I should have social norms?”

“You do have them. That’s a fact.”

“You say that it’s a fact because you need it to be one.”

“I don’t need it to be one. You do. You sit here surrounded by all your books, in one of which there’s bound to be some passage that fits my case exactly…”

“Which is?”

“Defining it is your job. Why make life easy for you?”

“You keep talking about categories, theories, test tubes that I want to cork you up in. You’ve drawn yourself a bull’s-eye and you keep throwing darts at it. But perhaps it’s convenient for you to think that everyone else is square, norm-bound, hyperrational and conformist so that you can enjoy your sense of difference from them, your eternal revolt against them. If I didn’t represent normality you wouldn’t feel comfortable with me.”

“You’ve never made love to a man… and something tells me that you’d never be able to…”

“Do you think that I’d have to be able to… in order to…”

“But I’ve had women now and then. There are women I can make it with… there’s a way of doing it… maybe I’ll let you in on it one day… that is, if I’m in the mood. Excuse me, though, for having interrupted you…”

“I hear about all kinds of strange experiences in this room, but I don’t have to undergo them myself in order to comprehend their significance.”

“In order to grasp them intellectually on a very superficial level. I’m talking about in depth.”

“No, not just intellectually. Although that too, of course… I was wondering a while ago why you pictured me eating cauliflower… where you got the idea from…”

“There’s no cauliflower cooking in your kitchen?”

“No. There never has been.”

“I’m sorry if I offended you… I smelled something on the stairs… I’m sorry…”

“That isn’t the point. What I’m asking is, why did you pick on cauliflower of all things? What does it symbolize for you? Perhaps it has something to do with the way it looks, its round, white lobed form that resembles a brain. Why cauliflower? I wonder: is it in order to portray me as an utter rationalist, a dyed-in-the-wool intellectual… a man who eats brain all the time… brain nourished on brain… a person who is all cerebral technique? You’re constantly sending me some message… it’s very clear… you keep staking out the boundaries of our relationship. You don’t trust me emotionally — and you don’t believe that I can understand you psychologically. You deny my emotional capacities. To this day you’ve never given me a real feeling of yours… I mean something really intimate… despite all your pretending to be candid…”

“I simply haven’t wanted to embarrass you.”

“What makes you think you would embarrass me?”

“Whenever I touch on such things I can feel you wince.”

“That’s pure projection on your part.”

“I’ve wanted to spare you the gory details of my escapades… you’re still so young…”

“You needn’t spare me. I never asked you to. I’m here to help you… you’re even paying me for this. I don’t think you understand my role here. I really am here to help you. Have some faith in me. Make use of me. If you sought out a young therapist, that too is significant. One always repeats some family pattern with a father or a brother or a sister. You chose me to stand for someone whom you needed to confront. Perhaps your younger brother, who according to you is a cerebral square just like me. But so far you’ve merely been skirmishing with me and avoiding working on yourself. You have great verbal power, a large vocabulary, a highly manipulative command of language… an ability instantly to translate every experience onto an abstract, conceptual plane… while evading the issue itself, of course…”

“I don’t follow you…”

“You follow me perfectly well. You keep telling me that you’re only here conditionally… that maybe you’ll pay me and maybe you won’t… that each visit here may be your last. You deliberately come late… you even picked an odd hour like this because of its provisional feeling, as though it were a form of weekend entertainment. And you keep insisting that nothing bothers you, that you’re only coming to see how I define what you already know. But we can’t work this way. I’ve let three months of it go by as an opening. It’s even predictable in a case like yours. But we can’t go on going nowhere… your time is too valuable… and so is mine…”

“Hey, you’re attacking me… for the first time… I feel almost stunned…”

“Don’t you think that it’s about time?”

“I didn’t know you had it in you. You’re not as quiet and innocent as I had thought, then… I rather like that. You know, what you just said about my brother… it was an interesting hunch… how old actually are you?”

“Why does it matter to you?”

“Oh no, don’t throw the question back at me. Now it’s you who are evading. Drop your anonymity for once and tell me how old you are.”

“Twenty-seven… but why?”

“And you really hope to identify with me?”

“Only in order to understand.”

“What an odd profession you’ve chosen! But all right, I’ll tell you a dream. You asked me a few weeks ago if I ever had any… well, now I’ve dreamt one for you, you can’t say I’m not trying. In fact, that was the real reason for my impatience to see you today… the reason I came on time… because I’ve brought you a fresh dream. I already lost most of it during the day, but something is still left… so let’s see what you can do with its dehydrated remains. As far as I can see it’s completely meaningless, but that’s your problem. You see, I must have known that your attack was coming, because I armed myself with a dream…. You know, I think we’re beginning to form a real tie. Now I’ll put you to work, let’s see you show your stuff…”

“I can only work together with you.”

“Together with me, of course. I’ve already learned the rules of the game…. On the whole, you know, last night was rather strange. My father arrived in the late afternoon and insisted on taking me out to eat even though I had cooked a meal for him. He was obsessed with some little restaurant that served a special borscht he had dreamt of all the time in America…. Okay, so we went there and the place was closed because of the holiday. But he insisted on finding the owners, and they were so overjoyed to see him that they opened the restaurant especially for him… only there wasn’t any borscht left. So they sent out for a whole pitcher of it, and for sour cream too, and he sat there putting away the thick red stuff of his dreams, smacking his lips and grunting with pleasure and joking and chattering away. He didn’t say much about his meeting with mother, except that he hoped it would all be over with on Sunday and that he was ready to give her the whole apartment… after which he began feeling so sick from all the borscht he had eaten that we went home. He washed up, sat down to look at all the letters and journals that had come for him while he’d been away, and then turned on the TV to watch an interview with some new politician he had never heard of before. Halfway through it he began to doze off, so we never did say anything important. I too went to sleep early… and then at two a.m. this old fairy knocked on the door, a big-time banker from an old Jerusalem family… an odd, sentimental character who’s fallen wildly in love with me…”

“Calderon?”

“The very same. Which means that I’ve already mentioned him to you and that you haven’t missed a trick. Exactly. Refa’el Calderon. I showed him who he really was and since then his life has been one big mess. It has no structure anymore and his family is falling apart. He runs after me like a dog, does all kinds of things for me, won’t leave me alone. A case for you. At the stroke of five he’ll be waiting for me below with his chauffered car. A real case for you… now there’s suffering… mark my word, he’ll come to see you yet. In fact, he’s already jealous of you. The man’s in a tailspin…. But to get to the point, he knocked on the door and woke me at two a.m. And I’m such a kind heart that I can’t drive types like him away, so I had to get up and listen to his pre-dawn confession. I too, you see, have my patients… in the long, wee hours of the morning I treat them free of charge… all kinds of oddballs… first they wear me down psychologically, and then they get me into bed and hump away… What?”

“Nothing.”

“I thought you said something.”

“No.”

“I don’t know if it’s worth starting on that dream now… we haven’t much time left… all right, I’d better tell it, just so you don’t say I’m evading again. I went back to sleep and Calderon stayed in the kitchen with my father, who had woken up too. In the end his wife even called… it was either then, or before that, that I had the dream. I’ve forgotten a lot of the details, but what I remember… what’s left for you… is more or less this. There was a small hotel, a building not far from a lake surrounded by distant mountains… it may even not have been in Israel. I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember that there were stairs… in fact, two sets of them. The ones I climbed were straight and light-colored, but nearby, as though they had been built by mistake, were the original stairs of the building, which weren’t in use anymore. They were made of rough old stone carpeted with an old, reddish rug that was worn at the edges… very windy stairs that led to some rented rooms, most of them already moved out of. In them I could see unmade beds and personal possessions that had been left behind — shawls, pins, dirty absorbent cotton, colorful robes… On the first floor, which I was trying to climb past, I saw sitting by the window — God knows how he had gotten there — my English teacher from the night school I attended twelve years ago. We called him Mr. Foxy, but that wasn’t his real name — he had some German-sounding last name like Neustadt or Freustadt… a gloomy old bachelor, a gray, impeccable German Jew who had failed in business and taken up teaching English at night. He always wore a winter suit. He was tall and bald, wore glasses, was round-shouldered, had this yellow skin… apart from his fingers, which were green from nicotine… and talked only English with us because that gave him the upper hand…. Now he was sitting in this hotel in an open white shirt, waiting for someone in a room like a dining room that had tables all around. I didn’t know if he remembered me, but I went over to him. He spoke to me in English, but it was an English that I understood, so that I had no trouble following him… the words passed into me as easily as though they were Hebrew. Without turning to look at me he explained that he was waiting for his hunting. I remember him using that word, and I knew at once what it meant, even how to spell it. Hunting. I think he must have been referring to some meat dish, but he called it his hunting in English, as though he were a country squire, or pretending to be one…. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“It seemed absurd that this colorless man should be sitting there and telling me about his hunting that he expected to be brought from the forest, fresh from the kill, because in the room itself there was no sign of anything like a kitchen. But he kept staring out the window. And there, low down, I saw a thicket of bushes with a hose sticking out of it from which some water was running. Something moved there. It took a step in the bright evening light, and then the water dwindled to a trickle and stopped, as though someone had turned off the faucet or bent the hose…”

“Yes?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s it? Did you wake up at that point, or did you go on dreaming?”

“No, I woke up. The telephone rang, and I heard Calderon begging for dear life.”

“Did you awake with a feeling of anxiety?”

“Don’t you ever give up? No… there was no anxiety… the phone simply woke me. But had I gone on dreaming, I’m sure I would have climbed down to see what the hose was attached to and who had shut it off.”

“And that English teacher… what did you say his name was?”

“The students called him Mr. Foxy. He was like a long, gray fox.”

“Do you have any associations with him? Have you seen him lately?”

“No. He doesn’t mean a thing to me. I didn’t even know he still existed in my mind. I haven’t seen him for years… haven’t thought of him… why should he suddenly have turned up like that?”

“Were you a good student in English?”

“No. A very bad one. Totally resistant to learning. I don’t think I ever took the final exam…’’

“Were there other courses that you didn’t finish?”

“No. I think it was the only one. Once I lost interest in getting my diploma I didn’t bother with it anymore.”

“When did you start night school?”

“After my junior year in high school.”

“Before that you studied in the same school where your father taught?”

“Yes.”

“Was he ever your teacher?”

“No. He only taught the seniors.”

“Was that why you left?”

“I don’t get you.”

“So that you wouldn’t have to be a student of his.”

“Oh. Maybe… it’s possible… that’s not how I thought of it then… but I wouldn’t rule it out. There were several reasons, but that may have been one of them… only how does that help us with the dream?”

“This English teacher… you say that he was a peripheral figure for you… are you sure you haven’t run into him lately?”

“Absolutely.”

“But in dreams such peripheral, meaningless figures are stand-ins for others. They conceal other, more meaningful figures.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“This Mr. Foxy… he’s more or less your father’s age… and like him, a teacher… did you ever have a run-in with him?”

“Never.”

“But you failed his course. If nothing else, he stands for the one exam you never took, because of which you failed to get your diploma.”

“That’s of no importance to me.”

“But it’s inconceivable that it didn’t bother you at some point…”

“No. I don’t buy that. But go on.”

“The teacher spoke English, but you understood it as though it were Hebrew. Now your father is in America, with a new, English identity. Behind it, though, his old Hebrew self is still there.”

“Go on. I’m listening. I don’t say you’re right and I don’t say you’re wrong.”

“The teacher in the dream had changed. He always used to wear a heavy winter suit — and here he suddenly was in a summery white shirt. He was different, no longer the same… like your father, about the change in whom you keep talking… about how young and artsy-looking he’s become. You said that the teacher was pretending to be a squire — the same gray personage who used to smoke the cheapest cigarettes…”

“The cheapest cigarettes? Hold on there. Who told you that?”

“His nicotine-stained fingers…”

“Are you an amateur detective?”

“I was just listening to you… to the details that you yourself were giving me. I’m trying to base myself on them. In the dream the teacher is waiting for some kind of meat dish, for his hunting… while last night your father went hunting for some red borscht. The link is so obvious: red… blood… Something about your father’s appetite evidently upset you. You disguised him as another teacher who meant nothing to you, you put glasses on him and made him bald… why was all this camouflage necessary? Perhaps because of what you’ve been thinking about him… because the dream expresses some extreme wish. You need to conceal it in order to protect yourself, while at the same time giving it vent. What it is, though, remains to be discovered.”

“I’m still listening. I don’t say you’re right and I don’t say you’re wrong. One little question, though: this theory of concealment — is it generally accepted or did you make it up especially for me?”

“Of course it’s generally accepted. It’s the ABC of our work. Every dream is a concealment, an entire system of them.”

“But what was I trying to conceal?”

“Something having to do with your father, or with your intentions toward him. That’s up to you to find out. Because from the outset the dream makes clear it’s about you too, about a problem of identity that concerns you. I’m referring to the building with the double staircase. Stairs in dreams generally stand for sexual feelings. Ascending or descending them refers to the sexual act itself…”

“Now you’re putting me on.”

“I would never do that.”

“Then you’re putting yourself on.”

“It’s an almost classic symbol, and in your case it’s expressed most clearly. You ascend one type of stairs, the straight, light ones. But there are others near them — dark winding ones that seem useless to you and are covered by an old, red, worn carpet. Red again, please note. And the stairs pass by a series of rooms that once were inhabited by people who have left behind possessions that are distinctly feminine: shawls, pins, dirty absorbent cotton, colorful robes… Between the two sets of stairs is a divide you don’t cross — a small, not terribly dangerous one which indeed can perhaps be bridged. What was it you said to me just a few minutes ago? There are women I can make it with…”

“This is beginning to sound awfully talmudic.”

“But dreams do work talmudically, abstractly, by means of condensation and displacement. You have to interpret them, to take them apart in order to re-establish connections and understand what they are trying to say.”

“Following your logic, then, what about the water hose and the bushes?”

“You have no associations with them?”

“None.”

“It’s not a place you can identify?”

“No. I’ve already said that something about it didn’t seem like Israel.”

“Maybe it’s some place connected with your childhood?”

“My childhood? Not as far as I can tell…”

“Or perhaps it resembles the place where your mother is now.”

“My mother? Up there? No… those bushes… there’s no thicket like that there. And on the whole…”

“But it is by the sea… way up north…”

“This wasn’t by a sea. It was by a small lake. With mountains around it. Someplace lush, like a Swiss landscape… I distinctly remember the mountains ringing it…”

“But that could be Haifa Bay. It curves in an arc. In the dream, for reasons of your own, you simply completed the circle.”

“You mean that the mountains in the background are the Carmel?”

“Perhaps.”

“No. That’s not where it was. You can’t get me to give in to you here.”

“I would never want you to give in to me. I want you to find your own association.”

“It was a dreamlike scene… can’t I create a new place in a dream?”

“You can. But it’s generally a composite of old places.”

“Well, then this was such a composite.”

“Do you remember any other details?”

“No.”

“There was no one in the thicket?”

“No. There was a movement that had just taken place. That had to do with…”

“The water hose?”

“Yes.”

“And does the hose itself suggest anything to you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What’s the first thought you have about it?”

“I don’t know… it was a hose that lay on the ground, almost merging with it. It was brown, but quite bright where it protruded from the bushes in the evening light. Water flowed from it and suddenly stopped… as though someone had turned off the faucet, or bent it to choke off the flow…”

“To choke it off?”

“No, don’t make too much of my words… someone passing by simply had stepped on it and stopped the water…”

“And did the teacher say anything? Did he react?”

“No. I wasn’t paying attention to him then. I just had this feeling that it was connected with what he expected to be brought from that damn hunting of his…”

“And what did you feel when you saw the water stop?”

“I thought that someone was about to appear in the bushes… and then I woke up. I must have heard father and Refa’el talking… and Refa’el’s voice pleading on the telephone…”

“Let’s go back to that place again. The landscape… the mountains… the lake… the bushes… what do they suggest to you?”

“On the contrary, you tell me. Maybe they’re symbols too. I rather like that. Don’t you have a dictionary… some sort of thesaurus with equivalencies like the one you gave for the stairs… in which you could look up bushes, a water hose, a sunset…”

“I’m afraid it isn’t that simple. Try again, quickly. What’s your first thought?”

“Quickly, my first thought is nothing. Slowly too…”

“You’re digging in here… taking cover behind your defenses…”

“From what?”

“I don’t know. But I feel that the real meaning of the dream is concealed here.”

“But I really can’t think of a thing. I’m a total blank. It was just some kind of fantasy…”

“That’s the easy way out. You have the key. I can only make suggestions. You thought you were bringing me some pointless, ‘dehydrated’ dream, that you were throwing me a dry bone… but you see now how dreams have their own language and methods of organization. If you can get deeper into it, perhaps we can still find its message.”

“It’s hard for me to think under pressure.”

“Then let’s leave it for the time being.”

“I feel so blank… you’ve drained me… that whole dream took place in such darkness…”

“I thought you said it was in bright light.”

“Only outside, by the bushes. I was standing by the window in the dark.”

“All right. Let’s leave it for now. We can come back to it some other time. Are you planning to accompany your father on Sunday?”

“Me? Why should I? Is it my filial duty? They’ll be better off by themselves there. I’ll see him that evening at my sister’s seder.”

“And your mother?”

“She’ll have to stay in the hospital. What can we do? It’s only in fiction that the newly divorced couple spends its first night under the same roof… reality is better organized…”

“Was she there for the seder last year too?”

“No. She’s always been at my sister’s. Except for the first year, when I was there with her. After that we got permission to take her out.”

“Permission from whom?”

“From the hospital.”

“Was she in such bad shape? I thought…”

“No. It was a legal matter.”

“Legal? How so?”

“Those were the terms of the agreement that got her off from standing trial.”

“Standing trial? I don’t understand.”

“But I’ve told you all about it.”

“Apparently you haven’t.”

“Father was wounded. There was no way we could hide it.”

“I still don’t understand. He called the police?”

“I did.”

“You did?”

“Didn’t I tell you? It’s strange that of all things you should have forgotten that…”

“Perhaps I didn’t realize that you had actually called them.”

“I had to. He was in a puddle of blood in the kitchen… there was no way of hiding that he had been attacked… I thought he was going to die…”

“I see.”

“They could have pinned it on me.”

“On you?”

“They could have said anything. And anyone could have believed it. I was the only one with them. Asi had arranged his life then so that he hardly came home, he was taking exams all the time and doing two years of school in one… Ya’el and Kedmi had moved to Haifa… and here everything had happened so quickly… she was like moving in two parallel tracks, both pretending to be crazy and getting crazier all the time… deliberately working herself up to a frenzy and then really being in one. Father was genuinely scared. He was afraid to be left alone with her and begged me to stay with them. He even paid me so that I wouldn’t have to go to work. He was terrified, but he kept provoking her too, making fun of her, mimicking her speech. She had started talking with this new musical lilt, almost singing the ends of her sentences, and he would imitate her, singing along with her… he couldn’t control himself. She would stand there explaining some long matter to him while beginning to sing a little, and he would start singing sarcastically too until he would be frightened by his own self and shut himself up in his room…. Sex became a bitter mockery for them too. Oh, I could still feel it was there, and maybe amid all their madness they actually slept together now and then….It went on like that until she began her shoplifting. But I really have told you all about that”

“Yes.”

“And about having to keep her from getting her hands on money.”

“Yes.”

“And about those screwball meals of hers… about the big food mill that she bought to grind up everything we ate… I’ve told you all that…”

“Yes, you have.”

“Looking back on it now, I think she must have been trying to transmit some important message to us by means of that nutty food. She was trying to tell us something through all those weird combinations of hers: cookies stuffed with cucumbers and green peppers, sweet giant meatballs, frozen fish heads, green cocktail spreads, bread ground to smithereens… sometimes it would turn out delicious… but mostly it was too abominable for words. Once we even found some stew made of dog food on our plates. Father threw up. He became afraid to touch any food. He used to sneak into the kitchen at night to look for bread and cheese…. The refrigerator and the closets were overflowing with her food. It smelled bad, the whole house began to stink. And it attracted animals too. All kinds of strange birds kept landing on the windowsills. Ravens turned up in the middle of the night. There were mice. The dog kept barking his head off to drive them away…. And then father began seeing doctors to inquire about hospitalization. Ya’el came with Gaddi, and, since mother was especially fond of him, I suggested that Ya’el leave him with her for a while. At first she was afraid to, but in the end she agreed. In the beginning mother was thrilled. She slept with the baby instead of with father and there were a few days of calm. Father took to spending most of his time away from home and locked himself in his study when he returned at night. And then one night all the keys to all the doors disappeared. Gaddi was still with us. Early the next morning we heard father let out this horrible scream and the dog started howling… but I really have told you all that… I’m simply wasting my money by repeating myself…”

“One never simply repeats oneself.”

“I’m not so sure about that…”

“And then you called the police?”

“He passed out and I was sure he was dead. I phoned them and said excuse me, whom do I inform about a murder? I may have been a bit hasty, but I couldn’t think straight with all that blood. And they came right away, as though they had been waiting to hear from me, led by some gung-ho sergeant. Father was conscious by then. He kept clutching his chest and groaning, but I think he was enjoying the sight of his own blood too. They took him to the hospital, and the sergeant went into another room with mother. He talked to her for a long time and then took her away. Ya’el came from Haifa and went straight to see the two of them, and Kedmi arrived later to pick up Gaddi. He prowled around the apartment trying to piece together what had happened, but I didn’t give him any help; I just went on mopping up the blood stains. Asi came that afternoon, went to the hospital, and took the dog back with him to Jerusalem….So that by the time evening came I was alone in the apartment with this strange, enormous silence. A few curious neighbors knocked on the door, but I didn’t open it. The next morning the bell rang. It was father, all bandaged and sulking. They had sent him home, the knife had barely scratched him. It shocked me afterwards to see how he told all his friends about it. Especially since the police dealt with it so discreetly. The sergeant in charge of the case recommended preventive hospitalization….I really don’t see why I should be blamed for it…”

“Who’s blaming you?”

“I can feel how you’re judging me.”

“I’m not your judge and I never will be. I want to understand with you how your mind worked, what motivated you.”

“What is there to understand? They needed to be separated.”

“I see.”

“I feel that you don’t agree with me.”

“Whether or not I agree is irrelevant. We’re talking about you.”

“But you said you wanted to identify with me.”

“Just in order to understand you better. Not to decide for you or take your place.”

“They needed to be separated… to be removed from their common hell…”

“And she’s been there ever since?”

“She preferred it that way. Maybe she needed to punish herself. Or maybe she was afraid that she would try it again. And once word got out, there was the public disgrace of it too. She was really quite sick by then…. And when he went abroad, no one knew how long he would stay. The doctors were skeptical about my taking care of her at home by myself. She couldn’t stay with Ya’el, because Kedmi didn’t want to have anything to do with her then… she herself preferred it that way… it’s a very decent place, by the sea. Perhaps you’re familiar with it. And she’s made a lot of friends there — she helps take care of a few of the patients herself. We even gave her the dog. At first it was meant to be temporary, but it was a convenient solution for us all and it stuck….Do you think we were wrong? Perhaps we didn’t push hard enough for her release. Perhaps we wanted to punish her ourselves. Just the other day I asked her again if she didn’t feel it was time to leave.”

“You were there the other day?”

“Yes. On Tuesday.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“Was it for some special reason?”

“No. Why should it have been? Now and then I go see her by myself… every few months. I come for a long visit. It depends on how she is, on the weather too. I call her in advance, take the day off, and arrive there in the afternoon. She waits for me by the gate and we go into town — sometimes to the fisherman’s wharf in Acre, and sometimes in the other direction, to a café in Nahariyya. I take her to a movie, we eat a meal in a restaurant, and at night I bring her back.”

“But why does she wait for you at the gate? Why don’t you go in to get her?”

“I prefer not to. I don’t like hospitals. Mental ones especially give me the creeps. Once a few years ago I did go inside and the patients mobbed me. It’s hard for me even to be near there… oh, I know it’s ridiculous… but I sometimes have this fear that they won’t let me out again…”

“Who won’t?”

“The doctors. It’s silly, I know… but how can I be sure that they won’t get some crazy idea? There’s a book like that by Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, in which a young man goes to visit his cousin in a sanatorium and remains there because they discover that he’s sick too…. Why run the risk? There can always be some nut there who’ll decide that I also…”

“Did you take her to the movies this Tuesday too?”

“No. We just sat and talked. There wasn’t time. I had brought Calderon with me to read the agreement that Kedmi and father drew up. I wanted his opinion — he has a good, practical financial head. And I told her a little about father, to prepare her for meeting him… about this new style of his… this great rejuvenation that’s taken place in his life. I said she shouldn’t be too quick to sign away her property now that she’s getting divorced and that she shouldn’t let anyone make up her mind for her. We spoke for a while about their apartment… about whether it was wise to let a half-ownership in it go live in America… whether it wasn’t a better idea to invest what could be gotten for it in something that would yield a good return. She isn’t all that old, after all… who knows what life still has in store for her. And she’s terribly naive, she has no idea that uninvested money simply melts away nowadays… she lives in an old-fashioned world…”

“And what did she say to all that?”

“She listened. My friend Calderon outlined a few possibilities to her. The main thing I wanted was to prepare her… to make her realize that she was in a position of strength… to keep her from suddenly feeling sorry for him… to give her some existential confidence before her eternal parting…”

“From whom?”

“Excuse me?”

“Her eternal parting from whom?”

“From whom?”

“Before her eternal parting from whom?”

“I don’t get you.”

“You said you wanted to give her confidence before her eternal parting… did you mean from your father?”

“What?”

“Your mind is somewhere else.”

“What? What did you say?”

“I said your mind is somewhere else.”

“It’s the strangest thing… I suddenly remembered… you see, that English teacher… that Mr. Foxy who walked into my dream… listen, it’s incredible… a really fantastic thing… how could I have forgotten… he just died… his name… how could I have forgotten… it’s all come back to me now… it’s amazing…”

“When did he die?”

“Just a few weeks ago. Now it comes back to me… I noticed a death announcement that the school had placed in the newspaper. He died a short while ago, and I didn’t remember! So that’s why he was in the dream… I raised him from the dead without knowing it… I’m literally shaking…”

“I suggest that we stop here.”

“Excuse me?”

“We’ll stop here and continue next time.”

“Oh, our hour is over. I see… all right then, next week…”

“We won’t be meeting next week. We’ll meet again in two weeks’ time. Next week I’ll be on vacation.”

“You can’t see me next week?”

“No. But we’ll meet two weeks from now at the usual time.”

“But who told you to take a vacation… I mean…’’

“Next week is the Passover holiday.”

“You don’t work on Passover? Don’t tell me you’re religious…”

“No. I’m just taking a vacation.”

“But you’ll be in Tel Aviv?’’

“I don’t know yet.”

“Can’t you fit me in somewhere? Even at a different hour… on a different day… it doesn’t matter…”

“I’m afraid it won’t be possible.”

“I mean any time that you want… any day… I’ll manage to make it…”

“We’ll meet again in two weeks.”

“I see. Just a minute, I wanted to pay you…”

“There’s no hurry about it. Next time.”

“But I have the money with me now. I owe you…”

“Next time. It can wait.”

“Excuse me… just one more thing…”

“Yes?”

“If I want to talk to you next week, just to say a few words, can I phone?”

“I don’t think the telephone would be very convenient. Let’s wait till we meet again. It won’t be long.”

“I just… I don’t know, but… I feel that something is going to happen next week. Maybe I’ll want to tell you about it… doesn’t it surprise you that I totally forgot that that teacher had died?…’’

“We’ll talk about that too, of course.”

“In a way I feel I’ve become closer to you today… I like you more. I didn’t want to tell you, but at first you were very off-putting. I mean physically… your being so short and heavy… and those muttonchop sideburns of yours… why do you let them grow? The style is much shorter these days…”

“We can talk about that next time too. Right now I suggest that…’’

“Yes. I understand. Suddenly I see you in a new light. You really do want to lead me somewhere… there’s a method to it all… a direction… you aren’t so passive…”

“Yes. Today you started to work in earnest. But seriously…”

“You felt it too?”

“Yes. But now isn’t the time for this. We’ll talk about it next time.”

“I’m sorry we can’t continue now. I just wanted to ask you…”

“Perhaps…”

“… just one more thing that’s been bothering me. Is insanity genetic? Will I go crazy like her? What do you know about that?”

“We’ll talk about it all next time. Here, don’t forget your scarf.’’

“I get it… I wanted to leave you something in order to have a reason to come back… all right then, I’ll be on my way. Just one last question: do you really believe that every single detail has significance… that there is no such thing as random, meaningless events… just the chaotic surge of life…?”

“No, Tsvi. Really. Not now.”

“Just one sentence from you. Please.”

“In a sense, there’s always a matrix to which the accidents attach themselves…. But I promise you that we’ll talk about it next time. We still have a long way to go.”

“I can’t wait. Today was fascinating. What should we start with next time? What would you like me to think about? You must be planning it already… no doubt that dead teacher. Although maybe we should go back to the beginning of the dream… to that thicket of bushes…. and the watering hose. You know, you’re right. One must never give up…’’

“We can start with whatever you’d like. Let’s leave it open. Whatever is on your mind. Even that dog…”

“The dog?”

“Why not? He’s part of the story too. But really now, goodbye. If you don’t mind leaving this way…”

“Someone is behind the door there… so I’m not the last, after all…”

“Goodbye, Tsvi. Have a good holiday…”

“Refa’el, is that you? What are you doing here? I told you to wait for me downstairs.”

“Doctor?”

“Excuse me, please.”

“Refa’el, not now.”

“I wanted to know if you could take me on too. Did you ask him, Tsvi?”

“Not now, Refa’el… not now… you have to get out of here…”

“Please, this really is not the time for it. But you can get in touch with me next month. Tsvi will give you my phone number.”

“Thank you so much… it’s been my pleasure… happy Passover… I’ll wait for you below… begging your pardon…”

“You see, I told you. But here I am clinging to you the same way… it really isn’t like me. I’m so sorry… I’ll go now. How did he put it last night? The boundaries are gone… but I’d really better go. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I’ll be seeing you soon…”