Homesick

2

THE DRIVE WAS actually fine. My little Lilach didn’t cry too much, she just threw up a bit on the ride down to Jericho because of the turns, but I cleaned her up with the napkins I brought with me and gave her some water to drink. On the Jordan Valley Road, she went back to smiling that smile of hers that makes her look like an angel, and Liron played quietly with his Tetris. Usually, he keeps on shoving his head between the front seats and Moshe doesn’t like that because it’s dangerous, so they argue about it the whole way, but this time, because of the Tetris, he sat close to the window and didn’t look up from the screen, not even when Moshe said, look, here’s Lake Kinneret. Too bad, Liron, you’re missing out, I told him, because it really was something to see: a giant blue pool glittered between the mountains like a mirror. I don’t believe it, he said — and for a minute, we thought he was admiring the pool — I beat my own record! I beat it! Moshe laughed and said, that’s great, kid, and my little Lilach started giving a whole speech in her own language, biddy, bodu, bu du ja. Liron, pleased with himself, finally put down the Tetris, tickled her stomach and asked, Mum, what’s bigger, the Kinneret or the sea? I said, the sea, and he asked, how do you know? I said that you can’t see where the sea ends, but you can see where the Kinneret ends, and he didn’t say anything, but looked satisfied with the answer. The four of us drove along like that, the Kinneret on our right, a whole row of kibbutzim on our left and Greek music in the middle, Moshe singing along with Poliker singing about Aleka, the poor little Greek boy who was no Alexander. I drummed the rhythm on Moshe’s knee and thought, no question about it, we have to get out of Jerusalem every once in a while, to get a breath of fresh air, especially during such a tough week when all the TV stations are talking about Rabin, may he rest in peace.

But the minute we got to Rabbi Menachem’s house, my good mood was ruined. On the trip up there, I somehow managed to forget that visits to Moshe’s brother are no big pleasure, which is why we only go two or three times a year, but as soon as we walked in and said, Shabbat Shalom, and Menachem said, may your Shabbat be blessed, and lifted Liron into the air and forced his face close to the mezuzah and said, little man, didn’t you ever hear about kissing the mezuzah? I remembered why those Saturdays get on my nerves so much that I always leave with my hair full of electricity. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to spoil Moshe’s time with his oldest brother, who actually raised him because Avram and Gina used to work from morning to night. The two brothers hugged and kissed each other on the cheek, and Bilha, Menachem’s wife, came over and helped me off with my jacket. No matter how hard I try to dress modestly, I always feel naked next to her. Bilha didn’t say a word, but she didn’t have to: the way she looked at my new earrings said it all. I checked that all the buttons on my blouse were buttoned. After the seder night last Passover, Moshe really let me have it about the bottom button — not the top one, mind you — of my white blouse that had been open and everyone could see — God help us — my belly button. I didn’t need that again. Meanwhile, my Liron had joined the ‘sidelocks unit’, Menachem’s four sons — I can never remember their names in the right order — and followed them out into the garden. Lilach was handed over to Hefzibah, the pretty, oldest daughter who always kept her eyes glued to her patent leather shoes. Hefzibah took her to the small room where Menachem and Bilha’s new baby girl, Bat-El, the latest in the production line, was waiting.

We were invited into the living room for coffee before the meal.

Your Liron is quite a man already, Menachem said, and handed his brother a yarmulke and a hairpin.

Moshe nodded proudly and put on the skullcap.

And the little one, Menachem went on, looks just like you, Sima. She has such a beautiful face.

That Menachem, he knows what to say to everyone, I thought, but I still couldn’t stop my mouth from spreading into a smile.

Tell me Moshe, Menachem said in a more serious tone, what’s the condition of the mezuzot in your house?

The smile was wiped off my face. My big toe climbed over the toe next to it in my shoe.

The mezuzot are in order, I think, Moshe answered and, sounding afraid, he added: someone came to check not too long ago. Why do you ask?

Some people say that all the troubles we’ve been having recently are because the mezuzot are being neglected, Menachem said.

I don’t understand, I broke in, are you saying that Rabin is dead because of neglected mezuzot? I couldn’t control myself. The way I felt came out in the tone of my voice, just begging for a fight. Moshe gave me the kind of look he usually saves for drivers who cut him off on the road. Bilha stirred the coffee, which was already completely stirred. Menachem didn’t say anything, thinking about how to answer me.

Everything is in God’s hands, he finally said. He looked up at the ceiling, leaving me the choice of whether to take his bland remark as an invitation to go to war or as a proposal for a ceasefire.

Maybe you should go and see how Lilach is doing? Moshe suggested. I had a lot of good answers for ‘everything is in God’s hands’, for instance, ‘all is known in advance, but each may choose his way’, but I didn’t want to make things worse than they already were, so I did what Moshe said and went to the baby’s room with my coffee cup in my hand. Lilach and Bat-El were lying there, their cots side by side, and Hefzibah was standing over them singing a lullaby I knew from somewhere. I stood next to her, looked at the babies’ faces and sipped my coffee slowly. All of a sudden, I saw that they looked alike. I mean, Lilach is a little bit prettier, really, but there was something the same about the cheeks and the colour of the eyes, and that was the first time I noticed it. Just like twins, Hefzibah said, as if she’d heard what I was thinking, and I said yes, the Zakians have strong genes, and I asked her, what’s that song you were singing? You have to teach it to me, I’ll sing it to Lilach next time she wakes up at three in the morning, and Hefzibah said, everyone knows that song, don’t you? She sang the words again, ‘The angel who hath redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads,’ and then I realised where I knew that melody from. Hefzibah kept on singing in a soft voice — ‘And let my name be named on them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Issac; and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth’ — and the memory slowly became clearer.

Ashkelon. Night time. My father comes into the room Mirit and I share and sits down on her bed. I remember thinking: why not on my bed? He already has long sidelocks and a prickly black beard. He’s wearing a white button-down shirt and black trousers. With one hand, he strokes my head, and with the other, Mirit’s cheek, and in his nice warm voice, he sings us that same song. But he trills it a little more. He sings it to us a few times, till we fall asleep. The next morning, he disappeared with all his belongings except for a new pair of Adidas trainers my mother kept in the drawer for a few months in case he came back. He didn’t come back, except in Mirit’s dreams. Every morning she’d tell me, whispering as if it was a secret, so Mum wouldn’t hear, that in her dream Dad carried her around on his shoulders, and in her dream he read her a story and told her he missed her. In her dream.

About a year later, my mother found out through the neighbours that Dad was going out with a rabbi’s daughter in Jerusalem and at night she took the beautiful new Adidas trainers out of the drawer and put them outside next to the big rubbish bin, along with a few of their wedding pictures, and in the morning the trainers were gone, but the pictures stayed there, mixed in with all the bags of rubbish for at least another week, because the city workers were on strike.

That’s enough of that song, I blurted out to Hefzibah and swallowed a sourness that rose into my throat. She stopped singing in the middle of a word and looked shocked. I must have sounded more upset than I meant to. The two babies started to cry in a perfect duet — when one stopped to take a breath, the other started crying. I took Lilach out of the cot and held her close to my breast, not only to calm her down, but to calm myself down too, until Moshe came to call us to the table. He couldn’t look me in the eye. What had he been talking about with Menachem? I asked myself. Your daughter’s crying, I said and held Lilach up to his face the way you hold up evidence in a court, even though I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to prove. He sighed, ignored my sharp tone and asked us again, almost begged us, to come to the table, Bilha laboured long and hard to prepare the meal, it wasn’t nice.

I thought, what’s this ‘laboured long and hard’? That didn’t sound like him. It sounded like Menachem. It’s always like that. A minute after they see each other, Menachem’s words start coming out of his mouth.

Moshe took Lilach from me and she pressed up against the soft stomach she loved so much and stopped crying. That made me feel better — seeing them together always calmed me down — and I followed them. We sat down around a table loaded with food, and at the head was the Shabbat challah covered with a white cloth and two fancy candlesticks that had been handed down from generation to generation in Bilha’s family, just like the stories about them. Menachem gave a sermon on the portion of the week, full of broad hints about the times we were living in, when the religious population was being unjustly attacked and we had to strengthen our faith, restore it to its former glory and respond to all the slanderers with prayers for the Almighty. When he said ‘strengthen our faith’, he kept his eyes on Moshe and again I had the feeling that they had come to some kind of agreement while I was with Lilach. I didn’t say anything. Later, I thought that maybe my not talking gave Moshe the wrong idea, that I agreed with his brother and also with their secret pact. But all of that came later, after the silence. When it was actually happening, I said to myself, what kind of secret pact are you thinking of, Sima? They probably talked about their father’s operation; calm down. I gave Liron some salad from the bowl because whenever he takes food by himself, it falls on to the table, and I smiled at pretty Hefzibah, who was sitting across from me, to make up for my being short with her before. I had some of Bilha’s chicken and potatoes in orange sauce and asked her for the recipe. And I said amen.

*

First of all, bro, I want to set the record straight. I’m not writing this letter on drugs. I didn’t sniff any coke, didn’t drink any San Pedro, didn’t eat any mushroom omelettes. They do smoke here every once in a while, mainly the Israelis, but I personally haven’t rolled a single joint since I arrived in this country of mountains. The air here is too fresh and clear to dirty it with smoke. Even sweet smoke. Why am I saying all this? So that after you read this letter and think I flipped out, you’ll know it’s not because of chemicals. I’m high, that’s true. But only on beauty.

Yesterday, on the peak of the Inhiama, it was so beautiful that for the first time in my life, I thought there might be a God.

Wait, hold on a sec before you run to the phone to tell my parents that their son has finally lost it, to organise a special rescue mission, the elite corps, the air force, an article in the weekend news magazine.

Hold your horses, like they say in English.

I can see you sitting in your small home (you didn’t describe it, but I have a feeling it’s small), that picture of the sad man with the radio hanging over your head (unless Noa managed to convince you to part with it, but I don’t think so), stockinged feet on the table, steaming tea in your hand (it should be cold now in the hills of Jerusalem, right?), rereading the first lines of this letter and thinking: what happened to the friend I know? Where’s the football nut? First he lays on me a theory about modes of consciousness that he’s developing and now he thinks all of a sudden that there is a God.

Wait. I didn’t say there’s a God.

I said that yesterday, after three days of a long winding trek, I woke up with the sunrise. I went out of the shack (not exactly a shack, more like a tin hut) and suddenly saw that I was on the roof of the world (we’d arrived there the day before, in the dark, those lazy Australians stopped every two metres). I went and sat on a large flat rock overlooking the valley. It was freezing, so I shoved my hands under my knees. The mountains below were still covered with soft morning clouds. Some of the higher summits peeked out. The sun hadn’t shown its face yet, but its rays bathed everything in a transparent, almost white light. And there was no soundtrack at all. Can you imagine it? No honking horns. No buses. No humming air conditioners. Not even birds chirping. Total silence. I don’t know if you can understand, but there was something about it that made me feel reverent. All of a sudden, I felt that all my little problems, the annoying way I missed Adi, it was all so small. There’s a kind of grand order of things, maybe a divine order (OK, maybe not), and I’m a dot in it, a tiny sliver of a dot, a zero, zilch. I’m about as important to the world as a fly in the Sinai.

I don’t know, there was something comforting in that thought.

Then the others woke up and came to sit with me on the rock, and the magic faded a little. I wanted to share it with them, but just the thought of having to find words in English to describe what I felt made me lose the urge. So I promised myself I’d write to you when we got to the town at the foot of the mountain, and I smiled hello at Diana from Sydney, who, first thing in the morning, wearing a faded tracksuit and with her hair still messy, looked like a princess (See? You have nothing to worry about. Some things about me will never change).

So here I am. We took a good hotel, pampering ourselves after the trek, so there’s even a desk I can put my writing pad on. Every once in a while, the voices of vendors in the nearby Indian market drift through the window. By the way, that market is really something. I walked around it today with Diana and thought about your Noa — I mean, ninety-nine per cent of the time I was thinking about how to seduce Diana (today she wore trousers that zipped over her ass, can you see it?) but every once in a while, a thought about Noa crept in — how she would love it here. Every few steps, a picture for National Geographic. Today, for example, it started raining while we were wandering outside (cats and dogs, as if the guy in charge of rain on a Hollywood film set got confused about quantity). All the vendors in the open market grabbed their merchandise and ran to the roofed section (roofed with sheets of torn plastic, just so you don’t make the mistake of thinking they ran into a shopping centre), and only one old lady whose legs were probably too heavy to run stayed where she was, closed her eyes and let the rain soak her through and through. Picture it: one old Indian lady alone with vegetables spread on the mat in front of her in the middle of a large sandy area that was turning into mud. Her face was carved with lines like the sole of a shoe. Her hair was blacker than black. And the clouds overhead. And the old bus that opens into a stall in the back. Nice, right? So what are you waiting for? Grab your backpacks and come.

You wrote that sometimes you feel like there’s no air in your apartment. That your souls bang into each other like the bumper cars at a fair. So come on, what are you waiting for? Come here. You’ll have all the air you need, believe me. And there are no cars here at all. Yes, I know you’re both bourgeois now. I read it in your letter. Apartment, work. Nappies before you know it. But maybe you could drop by for a few hours?

I promise not to go on and on about God.

Meanwhile, write to me at the Israeli Embassy in Lima.

(Your last letter was nice, but too short. Sometimes, you can wait two days for a train here. Try harder, man. Tell me a little about what’s happening there. Peace, no peace. The score in the Hapoel/Maccabee game. What happened to Licorice, that group of David’s. We’re pretty cut off here.)

Yours,

Modi

*

On 4 November, that 4 November, I went to David’s place to console him after his girlfriend dumped him. On the way, a little before the turn at Motza, they announced on the radio that Rabin had been shot. By the time I arrived, he was already dead. The spokesman’s announcement and all that. We sat silently in front of the TV in David’s living room. He looked terrible. Thin, his hair a mess, his eyes dead. We hadn’t seen each other since I moved to the Castel. He was up to his ears in rehearsals with his band, Licorice. I was busy adjusting to the fact that I was a couple. We’d spoken on the phone and set up dates to meet, but one of us always cancelled at the last minute. I didn’t know how to make him feel better. He really loved her, that Michal, from the bottom of his mixed-up soul. And I didn’t know if it was right to talk about it now that the Prime Minister had been killed. We didn’t say anything for another couple of minutes, just stared at the pictures coming from the square in Tel Aviv, and then the phone rang. Maybe that’s her? his eyes lit up: maybe she changed her mind. He grabbed the receiver. It was Noa, who wanted me to come home right away. She’s scared. She’s sad. She feels all alone. And the way she said ‘home’, the gentleness — I’d never heard that word said with such gentleness. I got up from the sofa with an apologetic look on my face. David said, it’s OK, man, it’s perfectly OK, and he walked me down the steps to the car.

The street was deathly silent.

The cold Jerusalem air made us shiver. We each hugged ourselves. And said we’d talk tomorrow.

*

I search the photograph, trying to find something in it that gives an inkling about the day it was taken. The night before, we went to the Knesset to see Rabin’s coffin, but the queue was enormous and we didn’t get in. We tried to join the kids sitting in circles below the Rose Garden, singing sad songs, but we felt a little strange. ‘Fledgling Fly Away’ didn’t exactly apply to us and there was a kind of innocence in the air that neither of us could connect to no matter how much we wanted to. I took a few pictures of the area, especially the stands that had been set up on the side of the road, selling corn on the cob from steaming pots, and we drove home slowly, cautiously. Everyone drove like that, with exaggerated politeness, the first few days after it happened, as if they were trying to rectify some deeper wrong by driving carefully.

It was sunny when we woke up the next day, and I said to Amir, let’s go to the Sataf Springs, it’s practically next door. We’re always so busy studying that we don’t go out, and when will we have another day when we’re both free, and Amir said, OK, let’s do it. He put his psych books (I have no idea when he took them out) back on the shelf and dressed in his chill-out clothes — an NBA t-shirt with long sleeves and loose trousers that ‘let his balls hang free’. I put on jeans and a hat, made us cheese sandwiches and took a picnic blanket out of the cupboard.

I look at the picture again. I took it from above, from the stone rim of the small pool. Amir was just getting out of the water, leaning on his arms to lift himself up. That’s when I clicked the shutter. His tennis muscles — he hasn’t played since Modi went away, but he still has the muscles — were almost bursting out of his arms (an impressive sight, even though I’m not crazy about bodybuilders), the two mounds of his chest were glistening, I really felt like resting my head on it, and for some reason, his uncombed hair had fallen over to the right. He had some white hair even then, but you can’t see it here because it’s wet. Two large drops are dripping down his forehead. There’s another on his eyelash, and he looks surprised, a tiny bit mocking, Noa, Noa, taking pictures again? The light is marvellous, the soft light of early November, the sun is dancing on the water, illuminating his face just right.

And also the face of the Arab boy sitting in his underpants on the far edge of the pool dangling his legs in the water.

Maybe this is where the inkling I am looking for is hidden, in that boy’s face. Even though he’s only background, seemingly random, he’s looking at the camera with a pretty serious and angry expression on his face. His eyebrows are contracted, his lips are pressed together in the kind of expression older boys usually have, and if you look carefully, you can see that his right foot is half-way out of the water, getting ready for a kick that would only collide with air, but is aimed — or at least looks like it is — at the camera. Maybe what happened in the square a couple of days before had put up the wall of fear again and that boy, even if he doesn’t understand the whole meaning, senses it somehow. Maybe his parents, or his grandparents, lived in the Arab village of Sataf, whose inhabitants were uprooted in ’48, and during this nostalgic trip to the springs they decided to tell the boy who it was that kicked them out of here.

Hey, come on. Enough. It’s obvious that you’ve been spending too much time in Bezalel, Noa. Are you starting to be a phoney intellectual too? Just a few minutes ago, that boy asked for a sip of your Coke, and when you handed it to him, he said thanks a lot and gave you a nice big smile. What’s the connection between the assassination and the Arabs? It’d be better to admit that there are no inklings in the picture. Or maybe there are and you’ll be able to see them in retrospect. That happens sometimes too: you look at a picture you’ve seen a thousand times before, and suddenly a new detail jumps out at you. That’s how my best project last year was born. I was looking at pictures of my family, and all of a sudden, I noticed a puddle of water on the edge of one of them. That picture had been taken in the summer — you couldn’t mistake the burning light of an Israeli summer — but the puddle was as large as a winter puddle. In the middle of August, I started looking for puddles in Tel Aviv and the surrounding towns. In car parks. In industrial areas. In the back yards of grocery shops. It was amazing how many I found. I took pictures of them with almost romantic lighting, as if I were photographing a Norwegian fiord, and I chose an angle that made the puddle look bigger than it was. I called the project ‘Summer Puddles’, and the lecturer stopped the lesson in the middle, told everyone to stay in their seats and ran to get the head of the department, because ‘this is something he has to see’.

On the way back from Sataf, Amir and I argued. A lively debate whose words got all tangled up and somehow turned into a bitter argument. It all started when I said I was sick and tired of living here, in this puddle that drowns its inhabitants, that it looked to me as if things would get very bad now and that I’d started thinking about doing a Master’s in art abroad in New York, say. Amir said that the States wasn’t such a bargain, he’d already lived in Detroit with his parents and they put too much ice in their Coke, and when you go to play basketball at the YMCA, there are ten people standing there and each one takes a shot into a separate basket, and besides, he’s sick of moving; but I insisted, reminding him of Modi’s letter from South America, the one he’d read to me the day before, and I said don’t you feel like getting away for a little while, to sit and look at old Indian ladies all day? He snorted disdainfully and said in an all-knowing tone, bullshit, you take yourself with you everywhere you go, and he turned up the radio to signal that he wanted to end the discussion, and, slightly annoyed, I said, hey, aren’t you tired of those sad songs, for example? He said, no! and turned the volume up even higher and locked himself up inside himself like a steel car lock, I could actually hear the click, but I didn’t know what to say to soften him up, because I didn’t really understand what had hardened him like that. The minute we got home, he escaped into his fat books, and even though I followed him and said, when we finally have a free day after so long, it’s a shame we have to waste it fighting, even then he wouldn’t make up, didn’t even turn his head towards me. So I went into the living room and looked at the picture I hate, the one with the sad man, and prayed that Amir would argue with me, that he’d get up and shout, because I can’t stand it when someone’s cold to me like that, and I turned on the TV and turned it off. All of a sudden, our whole apartment seemed too small, too cramped, and my mouth filled with the taste of defeat and I felt that it wouldn’t work, that the whole idea of living together would end in tears and I’d screw up my final project on the way. I went outside for some air, to calm down, but it was so cold that I ran back in, and inside, no one was waiting for me, except for the man in the picture who, just like before, kept looking outside through the window.

*

In eight years we never had a fight, Moshe and me. Not since we met. Maybe we would’ve kept going and broken the Guinness world record if the car with the megaphone hadn’t come down the street inviting the people who lived in the neighbourhood to a rally with the great rabbi, with a performance by the singer Bennie Elbaz, in the square in front of Doga’s shop.

We were sitting in the living room watching Wheel of Fortune with Erez Tal and Ruth Gonzales, and things were really peaceful. We hadn’t voted for her in the contest, but she was adorable on that programme, with her curls and her accent. She looks good, that Gonzales, I said to Moshe, and he said, yes, but not like you, and gave me a kiss on the shoulder, and I said, you’re a riot, not everyone has to compare with me, but inside, I was glad he still said that, even though I have given birth twice, and my hips have spread and my hair doesn’t shine much any more, like they say in the adverts, and I even have some small wrinkles around my eyes when I laugh. I stroked the back of his neck as a reward, and I combed Liron’s hair with the fingers of my other hand. He was sitting on my left and reading the letters on the screen out loud to show that he already knew the whole alphabet by heart, even though he got confused sometimes between letters that look alike. Lilach was awake, but quiet, completely hypnotised by the TV. The students weren’t making noise with their music. Avram and Gina didn’t come to the door with biscuits. No one called from one of those polling companies to ask what our political position is after the assassination (ever since that time I said I’d answer their questions, they never leave us alone). There was a bowl in the middle of the table with two bunches of grapes in it, black and green. Every once in a while, someone took a grape.

When you’re living your everyday life, you don’t think about the good things you have. You’re almost always too busy thinking about what you don’t have. But right then, I remember thinking: look at how beautiful this is, Sima. You have your small family. A whole family, like you dreamed you’d have when you were a girl. And then, just when an engineer from Yavneh won a refrigerator worth four thousand shekels, the sound of the megaphone broke into the victory music. What’s the junkman doing here now? I muttered, still full of the pleasant feeling my thoughts were giving me, and Moshe turned down the sound on the TV and said, that’s not the junkman, Sima, listen. ‘All neighbourhood residents are invited! Bennie Elbaz, in the square in front of Doga!’ the megaphone shouted. And Moshe filled in the rest: there’s a big rally, the whole neighbourhood’s going. The great rabbi will be there, and all the heads of the movement. It’s going to be something special. Terrific, I said, grabbed the remote control and made the TV louder. The engineer from Yavneh also won two plane tickets to London and a chance to be in the finals. Wanna go? Moshe asked. Why, what do I want with them? I answered. We were both looking at the TV, we didn’t dare look at each other. Then, all of a sudden, he got up from the sofa so fast that I couldn’t believe it was him, stood in front of me and blocked the screen. I don’t understand you, Sima. It wouldn’t hurt us to listen to some Torah. To learn a little Judaism. It’s far better than sitting here and watching this rubbish on TV. Daddy, Liron said, jumping up, I want to go to the rally with you. Absolutely not, I cut in before Moshe had time to agree. It’s late and you have to go to sleep. I don’t know why you don’t have your pyjamas on yet. Brush your teeth, put on your pyjamas, and go to bed. Get a move on. Liron walked to his room, but didn’t hide how much he didn’t want to. Move please, you’re blocking the screen, I told Moshe. He moved aside slowly, on purpose. The megaphone, which had already moved away from our street, was coming back. This time, not only music was coming from it. OK, I’m going anyway, Moshe said, looking at me expectantly. I didn’t say anything. And when I get back, he added in that same puffed-up tone that his brother Menachem uses, I want to talk to you. And if you don’t come home, my dear husband, should I go and look for you in Bnei Brak? I asked without taking my eyes off the TV. Yes, in Bnei Brak, Moshe repeated just to annoy me, and then he put on his warm jacket, went out and slammed the door.

Lilach started to cry. I picked her up. Don’t worry, sweetie, it’s just the wind, I lied to her. I was cross with myself for lying. So what if she doesn’t understand, you don’t have to get her used to lies from the time she’s little. Look, I pointed to the TV, it’s the finals. I took a green grape and put it in her mouth. She shoved it away with her hand and pointed to the black grapes. No problem, have a black one, you don’t have to throw it on the floor, I said, and pulled some black grapes off the bunch for her. She chewed them happily, one after the other, then went back to watching Wheel of Fortune with me. In the finals, the engineer from Yavneh won a Mitsubishi, free petrol for a year and a music system for his car.

*

I remember the day Nasser resigned like it was yesterday — that’s what Mama says when we’re sitting in front of the TV watching the programmes in memory of Rabin. Everyone knows that she’s going tell the same story we’ve heard already, but we still want to hear again, because she always adds new details that would be interesting even to people listening to it for the hundredth time. Sometimes, when she’s in a good mood, she makes little digs at us, her children.

Everybody had gathered around the TV in Jamil’s café, she starts, and I make the sound lower on our set, out of respect for her. It was an ugly brown TV with a tall aerial like a tree and terrible reception, she goes on. Every few seconds, a big white stripe would move across the screen from top to bottom, and the button for the sound was broken, but it was the only TV in the village and no one wanted to miss out. People were standing on the tables with their backs up against the wall, anything as long as they could see. HaShabab, the boys, she says, giving me an accusing look, were standing so close to the young girls that some of them took advantage and touched places they shouldn’t, may Allah show them the right path, and Jamil ran around in the crowd with plates of hummus and beans and bottles of fizzy drinks. People had big appetites before Nasser talked. Ya’ani, everyone knew from the rumours and Jewish newspapers that the war was lost, but no one thought he would … just like that, out of the blue. Everybody thought another one of his great speeches was coming, like the ones he gave that made your whole body shake when you heard them. Oh God, he knew how to talk, that Nasser. Raising his voice and lowering it, choosing the words like a poet. But that day, the minute he walked on the stage, you could tell from the expressions of the people standing behind him, his advisers, that something was wrong. His face was as white as noon, and his forehead was sweating so hard that even on Jamil’s poor TV, you could see the drops, and all of a sudden the café was completely quiet. It’s hard to believe, but even Marwan — she looks at my brother, who’s talking to his wife, Nadia — was quiet. Nasser went up to the microphone and started reading from the page in a weak voice: Brothers! he said — I remember the first sentence perfectly — we always speak frankly to each other, both in victory and in hard times, when the moment is sweet and when it is bitter, only in this way can we find the right path. Then he explained how the Americans helped the Israelis in the war, how the Israeli Air Force attacked first and the Egyptian soldiers fought like heroes, and the Jordanian soldiers also fought like heroes, and finally he said that he, Jamal Abd al-Nasser, was to blame and was resigning from the presidency, and, beginning tomorrow morning, he would be placing himself at the service of the people. When he finished and picked up the pages and walked off the stage, you could see one of his advisers wiping tears from his eyes with a handkerchief, and then, all together, the men in the café wiped the salty drops from the corner of their own eyes with their little fingers, even the biggest, strongest men, Najh Hasein, Allah Yerhimu, who’d been in a Jordanian prison for ten years, and Husam Mernaiya, who was the boxing champion of Ramallah three times in a row, and even your father, the hero — and here she looks at my father, who looks down — you have nothing to be ashamed of, that’s how it is, when they give a person hope and then snatch it away from him, it’s harder than if they hadn’t given you anything to begin with, and that Nasser, with his laughing eyes and beautiful words about the great, strong Arab people — he was like a father for us, a father who made us believe that there was light in the world, that before we went to heaven, we would go back to our village, to our land, and our heart would not be like the seed of a bean cut in half, and we would stop wandering from place to place like gypsies.

She picks up the key that she wears around her neck, the key to the old house, kisses the rusty iron, and continues.

Then the Egyptians went into the streets and lay down on the roads and begged, and Nasser cancelled his resignation and went back to being president. But it wasn’t the same any more. He was sick and weak by then, and three years later, he died. Everyone went to Jamil’s café again — the prices there were in liras now, not dinars — to watch his funeral.

She takes a sip of her coffee, checks to see that everyone is listening, and continues.

And I’ll tell you what’s strange: now Itzhak Rabin is dead, the Rabin who finished off Nasser, the Rabin whose soldiers shot above our heads in ’48, the evil Rabin, Rabin the devil, and instead of being happy, instead of dancing in the street and clapping, I’m sad. Look at his granddaughter, a pretty girl, crying. She looks like her grandfather, the way Marwan’s Raoda looks like her grandfather. I can’t help it, I’m sad for her. All the leaders, they always have a bad end. And what will happen now?

*

When our teacher talked about Rabin’s murder, she had exactly the same expression she had when she told the class that Gidi had been killed, and right away it made me suspect that maybe that expression, the serious look in her eyes, the way she bit her lips, all that was just a mask she puts on when she thinks she has to be sad. When she finished, she sat on the edge of her desk and asked us to talk, to say what we felt. Like it always is in those situations, when you don’t know exactly what to say, everyone repeated what she said, except in different words. I didn’t raise my hand. I haven’t talked in class for a while. It started after Gidi’s shivah, when I came back to school and didn’t understand what they were talking about in class because I’d missed so many lessons, so I decided I’d rather be quiet so nobody would notice that I didn’t understand, and after that, I got so used to not talking that even if I wanted to say something — let’s say at the trial they had in Bible class for King David, when they got to the part where he sends Uriah the Hittite to war — the words stuck in my throat and I had the feeling that if I opened my mouth, I’d stutter. Even though I’d never stuttered in my life.

When Alon said that the murder was terrible and horrifying, and Rinat said that the murder was horrifying and terrible, I thought to myself — when you don’t talk, you have more time to think — that it was weird how my world had turned upside down in the last few days. Till the assassination, my world was made up of my house, where we weren’t allowed to listen to music or laugh, and everybody else, who tried to be really nice to me but kept doing their own thing, kept being happy when Beitar won on Saturday, or complained about the prices at Doga. And now everything had turned upside down. Everybody on the street is worried, they walk slowly, talk quietly, and in my house everything is as usual, they don’t turn on the TV, they don’t care. Like Mum said to Nitza Hadass last night, everyone cries over their own dead.

Does anyone want to add anything? the teacher asked and looked around at the class. My elbow started to rise on its own, but I forced it back down on to my desk. Why bother. They won’t understand anyway. And besides, I’ll stutter. I’ll be better off waiting for backgammon with Amir, he has patience with what I’m thinking, even if it’s weird. And he always has something interesting to say. The day before yesterday, for instance, I told him that I think people who die aren’t really dead, but they live somewhere up there in the sky and watch us down here. He said that the first time he was on a plane going to America and they flew above the clouds, he really did look for the souls of dead people up there, or for God. And he didn’t find them. But maybe he didn’t look hard enough.

*

A red Egged bus is racing through the streets with a dull roar. It doesn’t pull into bus stops, its doesn’t open its door. It’s three a.m. The driver is Moshe Zakian. His passengers have long since gone home to bed. Moshe is the only one in the bus, clutching the wheel and staring straight ahead. No one is taking out money to pay his fare. No one is asking if the bus goes to here or to there.

He leaves the neighbourhood, turns right at the Mevasseret bridge and starts driving towards Tel Aviv. The road is empty, the air is sharp and darkness swallows up the trees flying past. After the descent to the Castel, he steps harder on the accelerator. A truck coming from the opposite direction has its full beams on. His face grim, Moshe turns his up his too: I’ll show him. The miniature Beitar menorah hanging from the rearview mirror jumps around like a football fan after a win. He presses the radio search button. The Voice of Music. The Voice of Ramallah. There’s nothing he wants to hear. He settles on Non-Stop Radio, Hebrew songs all night, including the greatest hits of this year. And still, the words Sima shot at him that night keep sounding in his brain. ‘Forget it’, ‘Let it go’, ‘Over my dead body’. Over and over again. You’d think he’d suggested something terrible. All he did was say that they opened a nice kindergarten up the street. Half price, twice the hours, good food for the kids to eat. Two of his friends had already transferred their children, and they said the kindergarten was good. Menachem, in Tiberias, thought they should. It wouldn’t hurt the boy to absorb some Judaism. The education he was getting now was a disgrace. Not to mention that the money they’d save would help them buy a bigger place. With a room for guests to stay. But Sima’s as stubborn as a mule. What exactly had she said? ‘For you, religion is a house, but it’s a prison for me.’ A difficult woman, as difficult as can be. Moshe fans the flames of his anger and slams his foot down. The red bus hurtles from Sha’ar Hagai and Latrun zooms past. OK, she doesn’t want to go to the rally with him. And she wants Liron to stay in the kindergarten he’s in. But is that a reason to talk about splitting up? We can talk. Compromise. Make up. What’ll the children think when they see their father in the living room in his underwear? Lilach’s a baby, but Liron’s old enough to understand what they said. And why should it be him, Moshe, who has to leave their bed? He’s the one with a bad back, and sleeping on the hard living-room sofa will make his bones crack.

Wait, his brow furrows in a frown. They say there’s a camera here, after the turn. Maybe I should slow down.

From the airport control tower, a light flashes. Once. Twice. The miniature Beitar menorah is still. A passing plane illuminates a cloud in the sky. Suddenly tired, suddenly limp, he decides not to go into Tel Aviv after all, and he knows why. When he was a child, he wandered away from his parents on Frishman beach and waited hours at the lifeguards’ station for them to come and get him. It’s dark in the city now, and he could lose his way. Besides, he has to be back at the wheel at seven the next morning. He has to be alert and steady. And God knows how late it is already. He takes the Gannot exit and starts driving back. More and more of the songs on the radio are in Rabin’s memory: Shlomo Artzi, Aviv Gefen, Yehuda Poliker singing sadly about taking back terrible things he said. Overcome with shame, Moshe remembers things he said during the fight, before he ran out. It was out of weakness that he’d said what he said. Sima knows how to twist words, she comes out on top in every little dispute. He understands perfectly, but when it comes to talking, well, it’s not exactly his strong point. As he approaches Latrun, he starts missing her. He sees her in his mind: in the delivery room, her plump, contented face, holding Lilach in her arms and kissing her. She is home for him. And he can’t breathe without her.

Eight years ago, he talked to her for the first time during break. On the way to the water fountain, he felt he was walking crookedly and thought he looked a mess. At Hanukkah, they started exchanging looks. At first, quick flashes, as if accidentally. Then she smiled. And he was hooked. He already knew every feature of her face. He already knew that her light-coloured jeans were a little too short and a beautiful part of her leg was exposed in the space between the edge of her trousers and the top of her socks. Based on her smile, he thought she might be interested, but how could he really tell? In any case, he felt that if he didn’t ask her out by Passover, his life would be hell. As for her, she finished drinking, wiped the last drop of water from the corner of her mouth and leaned against the concrete wall behind the fountain, in the shade. He walked the last few steps that separated them and practised one more time the words he’d spent the night before planning to say. But when he was standing in front of her, a gust of wind carried the thick, intoxicating scent of her hair to his nostrils, and instead of ‘I wanted to tell you that I think you’re very pretty’ or ‘You look beautiful in this light’, what came out of his mouth was, ‘Do you want to go to the cinema tomorrow night?’

He drove across the Mevesseret bridge and turned right.

The red bus is racing through the streets with a dull roar. It doesn’t pull into bus stops. It doesn’t open its door. It’s four-thirty in the morning. Soon, Moshe thinks, he’ll get into bed. He’ll hug Sima from behind, whisper sweet nothings in her ear, and she’ll forget the terrible things he said. If she wakes up, maybe they’ll go to look at the children together. There they’ll stand, hand in hand, in the kids’ room. He’ll remind her of how they once stood together at the water fountain in the playground. He won’t mention the kindergarten. He’ll be on his guard. Where’s the fire, tomorrow’s another day. She’ll admit she’s wrong after she hears what he has to say.

*

When the programme on Rabin is over, the men kiss at the door and my father takes all the sections of A-Nahar that were lying around the living room and goes to read them in bed, leaving only me and my mother there watching an Egyptian movie, and I want to say to her, Ya umi, I saw the house. I saw it with my own eyes. But I know that whenever anyone mentions the subject, it makes her ill. Forty years have passed, but the hurt she feels in her heart is as wet as the ground after rain.

A few weeks after the Six Day War ended, people started visiting their old homes. Quietly, not making a big fuss about it, they’d pile the whole family into a pickup, sometimes ten people in one small truck, and go. Back then, they didn’t have to pass five checkpoints every hundred metres like today.

Some people only found a pile of stones where their houses used to be. Some people, like the ones who lived in el-Castel, found their houses still there and in good condition, but Jews were living inside. They would stand and look at the houses from a distance, and if someone asked what they were looking for, they’d just turn around and leave.

The ones who came back from al-Kuds brought plums from the plum tree, the crooked one near the square, and figs from the muzawi tree, the one that had fruit as big as pears, and they told us that the Jews had built ugly buildings that didn’t fit in with the mountain, and that they gave all the streets the names of wars, Independence Street, Victory Street, Six Day War Street, and they told us about Aziz, the only man who stayed in the village to wait for the soldiers, and after he was killed, he turned into a black demon that entered into the body of the Jews and made them crazy.

We were the only ones who didn’t go back. My mother wouldn’t let us. She said she didn’t want to see. Didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to hear. With eyes glittering with anger, she would say, I will only go back to my home to live there. I won’t be like those fellahin who stand around like beggars, waiting; maybe some Jew will invite them in to sit in the living room and drink coffee, in their own house. She’d say to my father, and you too, don’t you dare take the children there, or else find yourself another wife.

Even now, sitting in front of the TV, my mother’s eyes are glittering, but not with anger. In the Egyptian movie, Mahmoud Yassin comes home to his village after six years in Cairo and only the dog recognises him. Yekhreb baitak, she curses Mahmoud Yassin’s father, who’s looking at him through the window, how can you not know your own son?!

My mother, she has something to say to everyone, even to people in films. Usually, Arab women are silent, hiding behind their husbands, but with us, ever since they took away my father’s land and he had to go out and work like a common labourer, he became weak, ya’ani depressed, and my mother talks for him.

I look at the dog that’s licking Mahmoud Yassin’s face, and remember my mother’s story about Assuad the dog. It’s a story she always tells when my aunts and uncles from Ramallah come for Ramadan or Id al-Fitr, and someone mentions the sweet katayif my grandmother used to make, and before long, they’re talking about that house. Then she says: Do you remember Assuad, al-kalb, the dog? Everyone says, taba’an, of course, and they turn their chairs towards her to hear again about the night they ran away, about how Assuad, who was a big, black dog, refused to leave the house and how his howls filled up the whole wadi and even after they tied a strong iron chain around his neck he kept on pulling my father, who was holding him, back to the village and how he looked at the long line of people with the eyes of someone whose best friend had just tricked him, and how at one of their stops, when my father wasn’t watching, he managed to break loose and ran to the village with the iron chain trailing after him and never came back. They never saw him again. ‘Even a dog was more faithful to his home than we were. Even a dog!’ My mother always ended the story with those words, and all my aunts and uncles lowered their heads in shame. Then they sang mawal to the village. My father usually started quietly and all of us gradually joined in:

Ya dirati ma lakh aleinu lom, lomackh ala menkhan. Do not be angry with us, our village, be angry at those who betrayed us.

I think he’ll apologise to his son, my mother said and pointed to Mahmoud Yassin’s father, who was sitting in the dark smoking a nargileh. Mazbut, ya umi, I say, even though I’m thinking about something else: should I tell her or not? Where is your dignity, she’ll yell, how could you build houses for Jews in our village? Aren’t you ashamed? Don’t you know that the land is registered in your name? Don’t you know that it’s your land? That’s what she’ll say. So why should I tell her? Besides, how can I tell her if I’m still not sure? And how can I be sure if I still haven’t gone into the house? We’ll be finishing Madmoni’s frame soon, and I still haven’t been inside, God forgive me.

*

If you think I’ve forgiven you, you’re making a big mistake, I told Moshe and turned my back on him. Two minutes before that, I had been crazy with worry about him. It’s not like him to go out like that, in the middle of the night, when he has to drive in the morning. I looked at the alarm clock every five minutes, then every minute, then I got up and went to the kitchen and finished off a whole bag of cornflakes, even though I knew that Liron would be disappointed in the morning when he saw there were none left. I read two magazine articles about Sigal Shahmon, one in For Women and the other in Modern Times — she said she didn’t want to have children yet, but family was the most important thing in life for her — and from so much Sigal Shahmon, I was ready to forgive Moshe just as long as he came home quickly and didn’t fall asleep on the road, God forbid, and have an accident, like Turji, his friend from work who fell asleep on the road to Eilat and now he parks his car in the handicapped spaces.

But as soon as I heard the bus turn into the street and knew he was OK, I didn’t feel like making up any more. I put the box of cornflakes back in the cabinet, jumped into bed, covered myself and pretended I was sleeping. I heard the bus door closing and the front door opening and Moshe humming an Ehud Banai song, ‘Maybe after all this, we’ll sail off to an island. The children will wander along the shore.’ Why’s he humming? I thought. What’s he so happy about? And our whole fight came back into my mind, all the ugly things he said — not said, yelled — what’s good for the whole neighbourhood is good for us too. If you don’t have God, you don’t have anything. He’d yelled all kinds of things like that in an extremely loud voice, like a person who’s not sure he’s right. Like my father yelled before he left.

By the time Moshe finished in the bathroom and came into the bedroom, I had forgotten that I’d softened up and just waited for him to say one wrong word or forget to turn off the light in the living room so I could stick him with some sharp words, but he didn’t say anything, and he turned off the lights and got undressed quietly, without banging into the wardrobe, and got into bed carefully and lay down next to me without stealing the blanket. But still, I couldn’t control myself and said what I said, turned my back to him and pressed my nose up against the frozen wall. When he tried to stroke my hair from behind, I said to him, Moshe, don’t touch me, in a tone so full of disgust that I even scared myself a little.

*

When form time was over, I put everything into my bag and locked the buckle. Rinat reminded me that we still had a catch-up English lesson. I told her I know and I don’t care. Lately, I bunk lessons a lot, but no one says anything to me because I lost my brother. The headmistress even took me to the grove behind the field for a talk and leaned her elbow on a tree and got dirty from the sap. She told me about what a good student Gidi had been, as if I didn’t know, and told me that her door was always open — which is not true, it’s always closed — and that I shouldn’t hesitate to come to her about anything, anything at all.

It was very cold outside, it was even drizzling a little, so I decided to run, but I stopped after a few metres because my bag bounced around while I was running and my pencil case dug into my back.

When I got home, I didn’t feel like going inside. Mum was probably in bed, she rests every day and stares at the ceiling or at Gidi’s picture. If I went in, she’d say hi, Yoti, there’s food in the fridge, warm it up for yourself. And I’d sit alone and eat cutlets and mashed potatoes, and the potatoes’d be hard around the edges from being in the fridge for a hundred years. I can’t go to see my friends from class either, they’re still in the catch-up English lesson, and besides, lately, it’s no fun with them. All the things they do, like sneaking looks under girls’ dresses with a mirror or setting up a secret camp in the Mevessert woods, don’t interest me any more. I mean, I drag boards with them from Madmoni’s construction site and exchange Beitar cards with them, but I have this bland taste in my mouth, like old pitta, and sometimes their talk makes me really pissed off like yesterday, when Dor said he hates his big brother because he always hogs the computer to play Doom and doesn’t let him play, and I wanted to tell him, Dor, you jerk, say thank you that you even have a brother. But I didn’t say anything.

I’d rather go straight to Amir’s.

I knocked on his door. While I waited for him to open it, I pressed my ear against the far wall to hear if Moshe and Sima were still arguing. Last night, Mum and Dad went out to the garden and all the way up to the fence so they could hear the shouting better. Dad said: They’ve been living next to us for six years and I never heard them raise their voices even once. Mum said: It’s a good thing that Gina can’t hear very well, it would break her heart. I stood behind them and was glad. Since Gidi, I haven’t heard them talk quietly to each other like that. I hoped that Moshe and Sima would keep fighting all night.

Noa opened the door. She’s so tall, I barely come up to her bellybutton. Are you looking for Amir? Yes. He’s not home. Is he at the university? No, he’s at the club. What club? She gave me that look grown-ups give you before they decide whether what they have to say is for children’s ears. He volunteers at a club, she said, but tell me, Yotam, maybe instead of standing outside and getting wet, you’d like to come in and wait for him here? She brought a dry towel and spread it out under me so I wouldn’t get the sofa wet. What club does Amir volunteer in? The Incognito? I asked again. When I want an answer, I know how to be stubborn. She laughed, no, it’s not a dance club, it’s a club for sick people, I mean, sick people who are already starting to get better. I didn’t understand. What does that mean? Sick with what? Noa offered me a glass of Coke. I didn’t give up. Sick with the flu? With strep? No, she sighed. More … more like sick in their minds. In their hearts. Crazy? Not exactly. Sort of. Half crazy and half normal. Half crazy, half normal? I remembered an episode of Star Trek when Captain Pickard comes back from the planet of the Medusas and starts acting weird on the ship. Instead of being serious, he laughs, instead of being decisive, he’s confused, and the whole crew is scared, that’s not the Captain they know, until Data the robot discovers that the Medusas on the planet secreted something that got absorbed through the Captain’s skin without his noticing it, and that’s what made him act like that.

I thought that Noa probably didn’t watch Star Trek, so I didn’t tell her about the Medusas. I didn’t say anything and just kept on fiddling with the sofa cover. Tell me, Yotam, would you like to help me with my homework? she asked me out of the blue. Why not, I said even though it annoyed me that she said homework, like she was a kid. She took me into the bedroom, to a glass table that was lit up by a lamp under it, like a moon. There were camera films on the table, arranged in rows. These are negatives, she said. And this table is called a light table. If you put the negatives on the light table, you can choose which picture on the film is the best and then scan it on the computer. Want to help me choose? OK, I said.

Every picture showed more or less the same thing: the display window of a shoe store. But there was a different high-heeled shoe in the middle of every picture. Sometimes, the price tag was in the middle and the shoes were around it. This is a project we have to do on the subject of religion and God, Noa said. I didn’t understand what the connection was between God and shoes, but I picked out two pictures that looked nicer than the others and pointed at them. Why those? Noa asked. I don’t know, I said, it’s like the things are arranged better in those pictures. Composition, Noa said. What? Composition. That’s what we call the relationship between the different elements of a picture. Truth is, you’re right, Yotam. The composition of those two really is special.

We went on picking out pictures according to their composition, and meanwhile, Noa told me about other things that have to do with photography: the camera shutter, the light meter, the special light at the beginning and end of every day that’s called ‘magical light’, and her photographing days when she just goes out into the street and waits for something special to happen in front of her eyes. Sometimes a whole day can go by without anything happening, and sometimes a fantastic picture falls into her lap right away. Like for instance yesterday, the minute she went out, Madmoni’s workers were getting out of the pickup that brings them to work and one of them, who’d fallen asleep, stayed in the cab. He was wearing a woollen cap with a brightly coloured Indian design, the kind you see only on people who have come back from trips to South America, and then she had this feeling in her stomach that she has when she sees something she wants to photograph, and the only feeling that comes close to it is the way you feel when you see yellow peppers in the supermarket, so she asked the worker if she could take his picture, and he said yes. She loves those kind of mistakes in the world. Let’s say, a plastic bag swimming in water like a jellyfish, or a stone sticking out of the wall of a house, like the one in Avram and Gina’s house, or the empty lot between their apartment and ours, which in her eyes is one big mistake. I didn’t understand why the lot was a mistake, but I felt funny about asking her, so instead I asked about the black container that was standing in the corner of the bedroom. That’s the Jobo, Noa said. You put the film in the Jobo and it turns it into a negative. Without Jobo, you can’t start the developing process. The third time she said the word Jobo, I had a laughing fit. That word, Jobo, made me laugh hysterically, and no matter how hard I bit my lips, I couldn’t stop. Noa tried to control herself, but in the end, she caught it from me and started laughing and pushing her long hair from side to side with her hand so it wouldn’t get into her open mouth. I suddenly noticed that she really was beautiful, like Amir told his friend on the phone. Especially when she laughed. After a few seconds, I started to hiccup the way I always do when I laugh for a long time without stopping, and that only made us laugh more. If Mum could see me laughing like that, she’d probably make an ‘aren’t-you-ashamed-of-yourself’ face, like she’s been doing since Gidi whenever I watch a comedy on TV, even if I turn the sound off. But Mum didn’t see, so we kept on laughing until the laugh muscle in my stomach hurt and Noa’s eyes glittered with tears. And then Amir came in. The minute we saw his face, we stopped. Even though he smiled at me and kissed Noa on the lips, you could still see right away that the half-and-half club had made him a bit crazy. How was it, Noa asked him, and he started zigzagging around the room, saying, it’s not easy, it’s not easy. I picked up a picture and looked at it so he’d think I wasn’t listening. Nava says that it’s because of the Rabin assassination, he said, and I watched him over the top of the picture, like a detective. The thing is, he went on, talking with his hands, that they don’t care about Rabin himself. Some of them don’t even know he was Prime Minister. But all those memorial ceremonies, and the sad songs and the special programmes on TV, it’s like their emotional antennae are picking up the idea that something in the order of things has been disrupted, and that pulls the rug right out from under them. Do you see what I mean? he asked Noa. Without wanting to, at the worst possible moment, I hiccuped and she didn’t have time to say yes, she understands, because Amir asked me in a worried voice if I felt OK. He’s fine, Noa said and smiled at me as if we had a secret we couldn’t tell Amir. Good, he said in a nervous tone that didn’t sound like him. I’m going, I said. I felt like I was sitting in the stands at a Beitar game when too many fans had gatecrashed and you can’t breathe. I felt like I was keeping them from doing something, although I wasn’t sure what. Thanks for the explanations, I said to Noa. She smiled. I should thank you, she said. Because of you, I chose really beautiful pictures. Won’t you at least have a drink of water? Amir asked. No, I answered, they’re probably worrying about me at home.

*

At night, after I came back from the shelter, I had a dream. It must’ve been important because I remember a large part of it. Shmuel, a man of about sixty who has hair like straw and wears cracked glasses, was standing in the middle of our living room and explaining his theory, the same theory he had explained to me a few hours before, in reality, in the club’s coffee corner (a peeling Formica table, two chairs, one with a broken back, lumpy sugar, Elite instant coffee, containers of UHT milk, spoons that had already seen a lot in life). The world, he explained excitedly, is divided into three colours: red, white and transparent. Red and white represent the two human extremes, and transparent represents the middle road, the divine compromise. In politics, for example, the far right is white, Rabin may he rest in peace, was red, and the true path, the transparent, runs between them. The same is true of love. Men are white. Women are red. That’s why hearts break. Now — in the dream — Shmuel bent to whisper into my ear: Look at your apartment, my friend. Everything here is red, white and transparent. I looked around the apartment. The dream’s director shifted the camera so I could see, with horror, that Shmuel was right. The chairs were red, the table white, and the wall that separated us from the Zakians was transparent. Through it, I could see that Sima and Moshe were in the middle of an argument, but I didn’t hear what they were saying. There was a transparent plate on the table. On its right was a red knife, on its left a white fork. But why red, white and transparent? I asked. What’s the logic behind it? Shmuel shrugged and nodded in the direction of the picture on the transparent wall, the picture that bothers Noa so much, of a man looking outside through a window. Its original colours, purple, black and orange, had changed to haphazard areas of red and white. I didn’t like that kind of modern art, and suddenly, in my dream, I didn’t understand why Shmuel was standing in the middle of my living room instead of being where he belonged, in the club. I turned to him to find out, but he’d disappeared. Or maybe he hadn’t? Maybe he was just transparent? The thought passed through my mind as I dreamed, but I didn’t have time to check it out because I suddenly heard pounding on the window. I went to see who it was, but I couldn’t see because the window wasn’t transparent. It was white and opaque. From the voices, I could tell that Noa, Itzhak Rabin and some child, maybe Yotam, had lost the key and wanted me to open the door for them. I went to the door and tried to open it. It didn’t open. I pressed my shoulder against it, but it didn’t open. I gave it a karate kick, but it didn’t open. And that’s where the part of the dream I remember ends.

*

When I woke up in the morning, his side was already empty but still warm, and the pillow had an indentation in the shape of his head. In films, in scenes like this, after a fight, the man always leaves the woman an emotional letter saying he’s sorry, or he buys her a bouquet of flowers, and even though I know that Moshe isn’t into writing letters or bringing flowers, I did expect something to be waiting for me on the kitchen table. That’s how it is with films — they have an effect on you even if you know they’re stupid. When there was nothing there but a half-empty cup of black coffee, I was disappointed. Lilach, who’s usually calm and laughing in the morning, was whining and wouldn’t stop. That little one is an antenna. She picks up everything. That’s why we always try to argue in the bedroom, behind the closed door. I changed her nappy and cut up a banana for her, the way she likes it. Meanwhile, Liron came in and asked me to help him tie his shoelaces. I heated up some cocoa for him and added two squares of chocolate to it, to make up for eating all the cornflakes. I put cuts in his orange so he’d be able to peel it during the morning break, explained to him for the thousandth time how to loop one lace and put the loop of the other lace through it, and the whole time, I was looking for signs of yesterday’s argument in him, but I didn’t find any. As usual, he drank the cocoa too fast, and as usual, he burned his tongue a bit. As usual, he forgot to pull out the points of his collar, and as usual, he got cross when I reminded him. It wasn’t until he got to the door and kissed me on the cheek, as usual, that he suddenly turned around and asked, I’m going to Hanni’s kindergarten, right? Then I realised that not only had he heard us, but he had also understood, so I said, of course to Hanni’s, and I gave his hair a quick pat to get him moving, and he looked up as if he wanted to tell me something, but then turned around and went out. I watched him till he went into the kindergarten at the end of the block and the minute he disappeared, I was sorry I’d let him go like that, without explaining to him. But what could I explain? I didn’t even know how to explain to myself. All of a sudden, I wanted to talk to a friend about what happened. To ask her advice. But who? I put Lilach into her carriage, gently, so she wouldn’t start crying again, and thought about all my friends. Galit always says yes, yes on the phone, and then you realise from a question she asks when we’re about to hang up that she hasn’t listened to a word. Calanit just had twins and you have to talk to her in short sentences because one of the twins always screams when you’re in the middle of a sentence and you never get to the end of it. Just last week, Sigal transferred her son to the kindergarten Moshe’s talking about, so she probably has a speech about it all prepared. For it, of course. People are always ready to boast about what they’ve done, otherwise why is that people always come back looking so satisfied from trips to other countries? Really, I’d like to meet one person who comes back and says it was awful. Then there’s always my sister Mirit, but I know what she’ll say about anything before she says it. A story like this, for instance, would get her all upset right away. Why did you fight? Why was he driving in the middle of the night? Why didn’t you give in? Mirit was always for giving in. Her husband’s been cheating on her for half a year with his secretary in the army, and she turns a blind eye. She says he’ll get over it, as if it’s the flu. If my mother was alive, she’d tell her a thing or two about the flu.

In my mind, I could hear Mirit say, but Mum was alone in the end, have you forgotten that? My mother had a heart attack and it took three weeks for one of the neighbours to notice. The medics who came said that if they’d reached her in time, there might have been a chance. Do you get it? Mirit goes on in my mind, I know that Doron is cheating on me, but at least I have someone in the living room who asks if I’m OK when I cut myself with the salad knife in the kitchen.

A second before I answered Mirit in my head, the doorbell rang. Noa, the student. They were out of milk. Come in, please, I told her, don’t be shy. She came in and before I could warn her, she banged her head on the new lampshade. What can I do, I said and straightened the swinging lampshade; we’re all midgets in this house. Everybody’s short in my family too, she said, rubbing the place where she got hit. So how did you turn out like that? I asked. I don’t know. My grandmother’s slightly taller, so maybe it’s from her, she said. There’s not much left, I apologised, waving the almost empty milk carton in the air. How about having your coffee here, I suggested, and without waiting for an answer, I filled up the kettle and took out a couple of cups. She talked to my back: She actually likes being tall. She was very introverted when she was a child, hardly ever spoke, and people noticed her just because she was taller than the others. Without her height, she would’ve been completely invisible. Well, I said, people probably notice you a lot now. With your legs, you could be a model without even trying. Don’t be silly, she protested and patted her thighs, and I thought: I’d take those thighs any day. I poured the coffee and milk, moved the carriage closer to the table and sat down. And what were you like as a child? she asked, blowing on her coffee. Me, I laughed, just the opposite. I was always the smallest, the last one in line in gym class, and that’s why I didn’t have a choice, I had to learn how to talk, to make myself heard. I had an opinion on everything from the minute I was born. I made sure everyone knew who Sima was. Besides, that’s how my mother brought me up — if you have something to say, say it. Don’t be afraid of anyone. Later on, when I was older and I used to argue with her for hours to let me stay up and watch Dallas, she was a little sorry she’d taught me that, and she’d say, raskh pehal hezar, your head is as hard as a rock, but I really think she was proud of me. And I’m like that to this day, stubborn. Like yesterday, for instance … I started to say and stopped. What happened yesterday? Noa asked. I liked her tone. Interested, but not pushy. Wanting to know, but didn’t have to know everything. So I started to tell her about the argument with Moshe, and before I knew it, I found myself talking about his family, how from the first minute, from the first family dinner, even before Moshe and I got married, they adopted me like a daughter. But on the other hand, they always gave me the feeling that I was a disappointing daughter, that I didn’t know how to make Moshe kubeh hemusteh the way he liked it, that I had too many opinions, that I didn’t know how to do up the house so it looked nice. If I offered them coffee when they came over, they’d get insulted and Moshe would explain to me quietly in the kitchen that I shouldn’t offer coffee first because that means I’m being stingy with food. But if I didn’t offer them coffee, they’d also be insulted. I’ve been with Moshe for eight years and sometimes I have the feeling that a whole life won’t be enough for me to learn his family’s rules. Yeah, Noa says and touches my elbow, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I waited for her to tell me a little about Amir’s family, but she didn’t say any more, so I told her about my mother, what a special person she was, and how she raised us by herself after my father ‘got religion’ and took off, and how she used to wear the same dress all summer so she’d have enough money to buy us books and notebooks, and how she’d sit with me and Mirit a week before school started to cover them with coloured paper and put stickers on them. She had a special folding technique, I don’t know how she did it, but the teachers would always say what beautiful covers I had, hold the books up and say, look at these, children you can all take a lesson from Sima.

I went on and on without a break, and Noa sat there quietly with attentive eyes, and Lilach was quiet too, probably from shock. She’d never heard her mother talk so much at once, and when I finished — I didn’t really finish, it’s more that I got tired — I saw that the coffee was cold and I got up, not only to make us black coffee, because there was no more milk, but also because all of a sudden, I don’t know why, I was ashamed to look Noa in the eye.

*

Whenever Amir has to deal with a glitch, he develops a twitch. Strangers might make a mistake, but Noa sees clearly when his lower lip starts to shake. And Noa herself? With her, it’s her face. Whenever it’s time to hand in work at Bezalel again, all her features scrunch up into a single focal point of pain. With the landlord, on the other hand, it’s his digestive tract. Loose bowels, to be exact. He was so stressed out during basic training that he had a constant case of the runs. And this last week too, the business with the kindergarten caused him so much aggravation that he felt the same heavy, burning sensation in his gut. And Sima, his wife? No sign at all. Not even when Liron drives her crazy, or Moshe drives her up the wall. Maybe because she won’t settle an argument with a kiss and a hug, she won’t sweep anything under the rug.

On the other side of the empty lot, every day Yotam’s mother sweeps her falling hair into a dustpan. Right after Gidi’s death was when it began. And her hair used to be so long and thick. Yotam’s father liked to run his fingers through it when he lay beside her in bed. Or smooth it down gently, starting from her forehead. Now they’re both so grim. He doesn’t touch her, and she doesn’t touch him. Only sometimes at night, unintentionally: his stomach presses against her back, her head rests on his chest, limb brushes limb. And in the morning, they go their separate ways with nothing to share. She brushes her teeth. He gets dressed. She combs her thinning hair. He cuts himself shaving but doesn’t swear. Sometimes, at work, his wheeze gets worse. He had asthma when he was a child, and it has come back now that he’s mourning his son. The doctor told him to get an inhaler, so he went out and bought one. Every night he takes it out of his shirt pocket and puts it on the table next to his ring. But he doesn’t talk about it, so she doesn’t ask him a thing.

*

I knew it would happen. How long can you not do homework and not participate in class and not bring an atlas to geography? I knew that someone would finally get fed up with it. And today, after I left citizenship class four times to go to the bathroom and met my form teacher in the hallway one of those times, it really did happen. She came into the lesson just before school finished and gave me a letter in a white envelope with the school logo on it addressed to Mr and Mrs Avneri — and even though I didn’t open it, I knew very well what it said. Grades deteriorating, behaviour deteriorating, social involvement deteriorating, deteriorating, deteriorating. Funny word, deteriorating. You can hear what it means when you say it, like crunch or splash. I didn’t give the letter to Mrs Avneri. Why bother? I knew what she’d tell me. I can actually hear her voice: you know how hard it is for us, Yoti, so why are you giving your father and me something else to worry about? Instead, I pushed the envelope under the monument I built for Gidi in the empty lot. For a minute, I had the feeling he was sitting on one of the branches of the big tree near Noa and Amir’s house watching me, disappointed at the way I was acting, but I ignored it and kept adding stones on the sides so the letter wouldn’t show, and I spread a few smaller stones and some earth in the spaces between the larger stones. My form teacher will probably call Mum, but I have another few days till then. I went into my room through the window, grabbed my draughtboard and ran across the lot to Noa and Amir’s door. I hoped one of them would be there alone, it didn’t matter which one.

Amir was really glad to see me, but his cheeks were all stubbly, like he was in mourning. It’s great that you came, he said, and stroked my cheek, I’m just taking a break from studying.

Wanna play backwards draughts? I asked and tapped the board with my fist.

You know what, Yotam, he said as if he was making an announcement, no. I think you’re ready for chess.

*

A few weeks after the assassination, there’s an outbreak of ‘N-Na-Nach-Nachman-From-Oman’ stickers on the streets. Cars infect each other with the sticker, and then it moves to pieces of white cloth hanging on balconies. An authorised commentator explains on the radio: this is the formula for a prayer written by Rabbi Nachman from Breslau, which appeared in this riddle-like form at the beginning of the twentieth century and tends to reappear during times of public anxiety.

Driving to Tel Aviv, Amir whispers to himself a couple of alternatives:

S-Swe-Swee-Sweet-Sweetheart

Or

P-Po-Pot-Pota-Potat-Potato Chips

If he worked in an ad agency, he might have made a sticker out of it.

But he didn’t. He didn’t work at all. He took time off this term so he could devote himself to his studies. (Which means he has time to think. Maybe too much time.)

*

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to stop working. These long days alone in the apartment. For the first few hours, I can still study: summarise chapters, mark passages, choose the right word from the ones the electronic translator offers. But after a while — and every day, that ‘while’ gets shorter — I get restless and start wandering. Gorge myself on raisins. Peel oranges and eat the peel. Throw a tennis ball against the wall above the computer and hope it hits something on the rebound, breaks something, so there’ll be some drama. Otherwise, without drama, the poisonous thoughts begin. I already know. They’re just waiting for the opportunity, lurking, dying to fill the void, like the less secure participant on a date. They make me jealous of people who work, people whose days are full and who can happily repress, at least for a few hours, whatever is troubling them. Yes, what’s wrong with repression? Entire psychological theories are based on the assumption that repression is bad for one’s mental state and that people should be liberated from their repression mechanisms the way an occupied region is liberated from its occupiers. After half a term at home, I say: repression is wonderful. Denial is great. Long live sublimation! I say it and keep pacing, vulnerable, inside these four walls. The bile of my soul rises in my throat. The theories that Shmuel from the club told me about return to haunt me. His red-white-transparent world menaces and attracts. His cracked glasses wound me. I can’t get the completely unimportant, completely irrelevant ‘what’s going to happen’ thoughts out of my mind: What’s going to happen when my savings are gone? What’s going to happen with college? What’s going to happen with the stain that’s been growing on the ceiling since the water heater exploded? How can I be a psychologist if everything gets to me? I’m influenced by everything. I don’t even have a laugh of my own. I keep taking over the laugh of whoever I happen to be close to. Once I used to laugh like my father, then like Modi, now like Noa. I’ll probably end up laughing Shmuel’s strangled, jerky laugh that collapses in on itself.

If it wasn’t freezing outside, I’d go for a short walk around the neighbourhood, up to Doga’s and back through the playground with the broken swing and past the stationery shop that’s never open. The last time I did that, my cheeks hurt from the cold. If it snowed, at least there’d be something romantic about the whole business, but Maoz Ziyon is located right on the dividing line: cold enough to preserve people in stone jars for three months, but not cold enough for white flakes.

I remember my first snowfall in Jerusalem. I was the new kid in class again, and nobody bothered to tell me about the unwritten rule in that city: if it snows, no one — not pupils and not teachers — goes to school. The guard at the entrance smiled pityingly at me as I went inside. I didn’t understand why. I walked down the empty hallways, expecting that someone would come running towards me with a basketball in his hand, or that a teacher would come walking down the hallway with her high heels clacking on the floor. It wasn’t until I went into the classroom that I figured it out. The chairs were upturned on the desks. Yesterday’s Bible homework assignment was written on the board: describe and explain the fall of King Saul. Outside the window, snowflakes continued to curl around in the air, like my father’s signature. I took my chair off my desk and sat down. Every movement I made — moving my schoolbag, shifting my position in the chair, coughing — was tremendously loud in the empty classroom. I waited a few minutes; maybe one of those nerdy girls who sit in the front row would come. When that didn’t happen, I got up, turned my chair over on the desk as noisily as I could, on purpose, and went home. On the way, I trampled on the lumps of snow that had piled up on the edges of the pavement, my eyes tearful from the wind.

Now, I also feel like turning my chair over on my desk and going. But where? I could always call someone. But who? At this hour, the world is playing musical chairs and I’m the only one left standing. Noa’s unreachable, running around between Bezalel and the café. David’s up to his bald head with rehearsals for Licorice’s first show at the Pargod. He usually calls me between one and two in the morning, whining about how much he misses Michal in a voice hoarse from singing. I calm him down, remind him of her bad qualities (she’d better not go back to him, or else I’m in deep shit) and send him back to the rehearsal. And crazy Modi is trekking around the world. Man, I could really do with a tennis game with him now. One or two sets. A backhand smash on the line. An easy, well-placed volley that he can’t get to, and then we’d sit in the pub, sweating and thirsty, drinking and laughing, laughing and drinking. But he’s so far away now, my best friend. His letters get more and more funnysophical, filled with an intoxicating sense of freedom, and cut off. Very cut off.

Which leaves me every day with the voices of Moshe and Sima arguing on the other side of the wall.

There’s something embarrassing about this vocal voyeurism, so the minute they start, I cover the water-heater hole and turn on the radio. But still, probably on the sub-threshold level (we learned about that in Cognitive Psychology — your brain absorbs impressions without your being aware it), I realised that the argument was about their son. And it was serious. Even Noa, who’s become friendly with Sima lately, mentioned a crisis. I hope our landlords don’t suddenly separate on us. It happened to David once. The woman just threw him and his guitar out of the apartment with a week’s notice. On the other hand — the thought flashes through my mind — I hope they do separate and we leave and finally there’ll be a change. No! I get my balance back. Just so I don’t have to move again. Now that I’ve finally got used to this apartment. To the neighbourhood. To Yotam. To his soft, hesitant knocking on the door.

On days like this, I find myself waiting impatiently for him.

When I see him, with the hems of his trousers folded up and his hair falling into his eyes, and the mischievousness that sometimes bursts out of the sweater of sadness he wears, something inside me smiles. Yesterday, for example, in the middle of an especially poisonous thought (Noa and I are frauds. We palm off on the world, and on each other, the pretence that we’re so calm, so cool and self-contained. But inside, we’re both in utter turmoil.) he appeared with his draughtboard. I was getting tired of draughts — we play it a lot in the club — so I offered to teach him chess. He agreed happily. It seems that Gidi had promised to teach him, but never got the chance. I stopped myself from asking about Gidi. He’ll tell me when he wants to, not a nudge sooner. I took the board out of the cupboard and opened it on the table. The bishops shook themselves off, the knights stretched. I hadn’t taken them out of the box in a long time. I took my old chess stopwatch out of a drawer and put it down next to the board, even though I didn’t think we’d use it. What colour do you want to be, Yotam? White. Kids always choose white. But for some reason, from the first time I played with my father, I preferred black. OK. Now you arrange the pieces on the board. For every one I put down, you do the same. First the pawns, in the second row. They’re the least important. Then the rook. The bishop. And the knight. Then the queen and the king. How can you tell the difference between the queen and the king? That’s a good question.

*

Lately, when Noa comes home, Amir’s happiness at her return is diluted with a kind of pre-insult. Before he has a specific reason, the insult is already lying in wait, ready to spring. He’s waiting for the kiss that doesn’t last long enough, for the careless way she drops her things. For anything that will give him an excuse to make a nasty crack. And Noa stands in front of him unprepared, taken aback. Her feet hurt her so much that she can’t restrain herself, try and understand. So she answers him back. And for a few minutes they repel each other, like magnets pressed together on the wrong side. He goes to his study. She goes to the shower. He tries to read an article, but can’t manage to understand. The soap keeps dropping out of her hand. And when she finally comes out wrapped in two towels, he gets down on one knee. I’m sorry, Noa baby, he says, I don’t know what came over me. I wait for you all day, thinking of what I’ll say, and then when you come, instead of being nice, I’m mean to you. She runs her fingers through his hair and says, I had a crazy day too. You know what, let’s decide to be nice to each other from now on. And he thinks: how can anyone think that you just decide, and all the bad feelings are gone. But he swallows his irritation and tries to change the subject. You know, he says, following her to the bedroom, Sima and Moshe fight all the time. I try not to listen, but the walls are so thin. Yes, she says, it’s that business with the kindergarten. I can’t see him backing down and she certainly won’t give in. I just hope they don’t separate and force us to look for another apartment. It would be just too much, Amir says, after we opened a credit account at Doga. Right, Noa laughs and continues, after I learned how to navigate the tile path to the house. After drivers finally started giving me a ride to the big bridge. Wait a minute, Amir says, suddenly angry, since when do you hitch rides? Everyone does it here, Noa says, brushing his worry aside. It’s not dangerous. You stand on the road and if they know you, they take you to the bridge. It’s really very close. OK, Amir says in a gentle voice that smoothes away the wrinkle that has suddenly appeared during their conversation. Yallah, do we ever talk a lot. X-Files is starting, he says in excited anticipation.

They go into the living room. He sits down on the armchair. She sits down on him. So he moves a little to the side. The opening music sounds loudly in the air. The subtitle appears: ‘The truth is out there somewhere.’

A rebellious thought passes suddenly through Noa’s mind: I’m out all day trying to make a buck. If Sima and Moshe separate and we have to leave, I’ll tell him goodbye and good luck. I’ll find myself an apartment in a good part of town. With a girl for a room-mate. And none of these problems to weigh me down.

A rebellious thought passes suddenly through Amir’s mind: It’s pretty crowded, the two of us on this small armchair.

The camera zooms in on a clearing in the woods: a group of robed people are praying to the devil. Mulder isn’t around, of course. Scully’s hiding behind a bush. And the music gets louder. Louder. Louder. The violins screech. The drums boom. Amir wriggles around on the chair trying to find some room.

*

A fifteen-minute stop, Moshe announces on the loudspeaker. Someone yells from the back of the bus: how long? Moshe bends forward again: fifteen minutes, he repeats, and waits patiently for the last passenger to get off. He looks in the mirror, checking all the seats in the bus. The old people usually get off first, their steps small and slow. This time, it’s a soldier who’s been sleeping since he got on the bus an hour and a half ago. He’s walking down the aisle, his rifle bouncing on his back and he grabs the barrel so it won’t bang against the exit door when he gets off to buy a snack. But it does anyway. Moshe extricates himself from the narrow space between his seat and the coin dispenser, takes a last look to see that no one’s left behind and gets off the bus to unwind. A nasty wind blows hard against his face. Masmiya junction looks as if there’s been an earthquake there. The iron support of a bus stop shelter, without the shelter, is lying on the black asphalt, flyers for ‘Dr Roach — Exterminators Inc.’ are strewn everywhere. Even though there’s no supermarket in the area, an overturned supermarket trolley is lying half under a car. Just a huge, slightly menacing petrol station and a snack bar. You can buy pitta filled with an omelette, hummus and hot sauce there. Moshe has never eaten a sandwich that could compare. He stops here just so he can have one. But today, his appetite is gone. Worry keeps rising in his gorge. The fight with Sima never seems to end, and when he came home yesterday, she turned her back on him again. What’ll he do now? Without thinking, without deciding that this is what he’ll do, he goes to the payphone nearby and calls his brother, the rabbi.

I hope I’m not disturbing you, Rabbi Zakian, he says, and his brother replies, laughing to reassure him: heaven forbid, you caught me between lessons and besides, dear brother, I always have time for you. For you, anything. Moshe begins to tell him, first in half-sentences, as if he were hesitating, and then it flows out of him like a spring. All the words that he didn’t have the day before with Sima are miraculously there and he tells his brother everything. For me, God is home, he says, and for Sima, a prison. For me, God is peace, and for her, it’s like having someone watch her every move. Menachem listens patiently for a long time, hmming every once in a while so Moshe will know he’s still on the line. He lets his brother finish telling the whole story before he sighs and says: I am here for you. Then Moshe asks: but tell me what you think I should do. And Menachem replies: What I think is of no importance, and this is all I will say — the way will be illuminated for the righteous and joy will come to the upright. Moshe, not sure that he understands the meaning of the verse, persists and asks again: but what exactly should I do so things don’t get worse? Before Menachem has time to answer, someone knocks on the phone booth glass. The soldier, his eyes still red, is trying to tell him something. He uncovers his watch, presses it against the glass and shows Moshe the time. Moshe looks and is horrified. The break ended long ago. Shivers of shame run down his spine. He has to end the conversation right now. He thanks his brother, says goodbye and hurries after the soldier to the bus. The passengers are already waiting there, and one of them shouts at him: what a disgrace. How could you forget about us, the passengers on your bus? Someone else says: it’s because Egged’s a monopoly, so they do whatever they want. Mortified, Moshe makes his way through the crowd to the bus door. Nothing like this has ever happened to him before.

*

So, what do you think? I ask Noa a few mornings later, when she comes over for coffee again. Her eyes are wandering over the walls as if they are cameras and I feel bad that I didn’t have time to tidy up before she came. The only pictures we have on the walls are paintings of vases we got as gifts from some distant uncle of Moshe’s who thinks he’s Van Gogh, and giant photos of Moshe’s brothers and his parents at our wedding. So the place should at least be neat. Nu, I push her, I’m the one who talks the whole time. So what about you? What do you think? I lean on my elbows and wait for her verdict. She starts talking. Stops. Starts talking. Stops. What are you afraid of, I say and laugh at her. Tell me what you feel, from your guts, don’t think too much. But who am I to express an opinion, I’m not … she protests. I roll my eyes up to the ceiling. Don’t worry, I won’t take it like the Torah from Mount Sinai. All I want is another opinion. OK, she says, giving in, and she takes a toothpick and holds it between her fingers like a cigarette. First of all — she starts taking puffs of the toothpick — I think you should go and see that kindergarten before you decide about it. By the way, I wouldn’t mind going with you. We have a project to do on religion and God, and the truth is that we’ve already handed it in. I took pictures full of shoes in display windows to symbolise the western world’s worship of brand names, but the lecturer said I was running away from an emotional confrontation with the subject. And second of all? I ask, urging her on, and I take a toothpick too. Second of all, I think that this whole thing is deeper than whether you choose this kindergarten or a different one. Which means …? I’m still pulling her opinion out of her like you pull a tissue out of a box with an opening that’s too small. It means, she says, chewing on the toothpick, based on how strongly you feel about it, that this is all about … About a principle and you have to see whether you’re ready to give up on it. Whether you’re really ready to give up on it. Because if you’re not really ready and you give up on it anyway, it’ll keep on eating you up inside. Ow! The toothpick stabbed her tongue.

Thanks, I say. Feel like something sweet? She stares at me, surprised by the quick change of subject. She doesn’t know me yet. With me, there’s no going on and on about nothing. Once I get it, I get it. We both put our smoked toothpicks in the ashtray and I get up to empty it and bring a few biscuits. How’s things with you and Amir, I ask on the way, do you feel good in our apartment? Yes, she says, sure. You know, I tell her, that’s the first place we lived in. Right after we got married. It’s our first apartment together too, she says. There’s something strange about the way she says that. Her tone gets lower towards the end of the sentence, like lips that open up to smile and then drop at the corners. No, more like a smile that disappears too fast. I go back to the table with a full plate. She eats a biscuit and it knocks her off her feet. How … what … what is this incredible thing, she asks and takes another one from the plate and brings it up to her nose. It’s baba, I explain. Moshe’s mother taught me how to make it. Dough with a thick layer of date spread and nuts and all kinds of spices. I just have to take some for Amir, he loves sweets, she says. But again, instead of saying it happily, she says it as if she should take him some biscuits but she doesn’t really feel like it. She wets a finger and picks a few baba crumbs off the plate with it, puts the finger in her mouth and gives me a different kind of look, like she’s sizing me up, the look of a personnel manager. I fill Lilach’s bottle and wait. If she wants to, she’ll tell me. She keeps on picking up crumbs and doesn’t say anything. What’s her problem, I ask myself, insulted, I’m not good enough for her? I didn’t pass the test? So I don’t have a degree, so what. You don’t need a degree to understand people. And besides, why should I tell her about myself and about Moshe if she doesn’t tell me anything? I shush myself and put the teat into Lilach’s mouth. A minute ago you said she’d decide whether to tell you or not, so what’s your problem? I scold myself. Calm down. Just don’t blurt out some nasty remark, like you do sometimes when you feel insulted. Sharona hasn’t talked to you for two years because you told her that her little boy was fat, after she had the nerve to say something about Liron’s haircut. Better change the subject.

Do you remember that Arab who came to ask for water, I ask. Noa nods. So listen to this, I say. Day before yesterday, Gina, Moshe’s mother, comes back from Doga with bags full of food, and that worker jumps out from behind her, asks her if she needs help and offers to carry her bags to the house. She says no, thank you. But he insists. Free delivery, lady, free delivery, he says. Then he grabs the handle of a bag and starts pulling it. But she doesn’t let him. I don’t need delivery. I don’t need any help. So the two of them keep tugging at the bag till it tears, and everything in it — oranges, pears, onions, a box of eggs — falls out all over the pavement. The minute the Arab sees that, he gets scared, does an about-face and disappears, leaving Grandma Gina standing there in the middle of the street, in the middle of the day, with one shoe covered in egg yolk and oranges all around as if she was the tree and they all fell off her. Lucky I was home. I heard her screaming hutmani! hutmani! — which is oh my God in Kurdish. I went outside, helped her pick up everything — not that she said thank you — put it all away in the fridge and then I went right to Madmoni to complain. Naturally, he wasn’t there. Or the workers either, because they have some kind of holiday and they knocked off early. His wife said they’d take care of it right away, but today I saw that worker get out of the pickup. How do you like that? He has a lot of nerve, don’t you think? All the dust on the windows and the hammers banging in the morning isn’t enough, now this?

*

The book of books in Noa and Amir’s apartment: One Hundred Years of Solitude. Amir started reading it first, but Noa commandeered it. Ever since, they’ve been arguing, half jokingly, half seriously, about who has the right to read it. Unhand that book, Jose Arcadio Buendia, Noa says and throws a pillow at Amir. Sorry, Amir replies, but it’s too late, Remedios Moscote, my dear. When he informs her one day on the phone from Tel Aviv that he might be late, she tells him to hurry up, but she’s really thinking, this is great. Now she can dive into the pages of the book without worrying he’s about to come back. It isn’t nice to say, but lately, she has to admit that she has a much better time when he isn’t here. She can sit quietly at her light table. She can spend hours choosing negatives. She can just rest and play around with ideas without worrying that he’ll interrupt. And screw things up.

For Liron, the book of the year is Atlantis, the Kingdom under the Sea. Moshe suggests to him gently, over and over again, how about trying a different book today? But Liron’s soul is bound to Atlantis, and he won’t agree. His eyes gleaming with excitement, as if this were the first time, he listens to Moshe read to him once again about the lost kingdom. About dragons breathing fire so hot that even water can’t put it out. About knights talking together at the bottom of the sea, with no bubbles coming through their lips. About whales that live in wrecked ships. And more. So much more. From her cot, Lilach the baby is also listening to the adventures of the deep. It’s not clear whether she understands, but the story helps her fall asleep. And Sima, the mother, is enjoying a few rare moments of rest. She glances at Moshe and the children and, despite herself, a feeling of warmth surges through her breast. It’s not easy to be angry at a father like him. On the other hand, she hardens her heart. Which kindergarten Liron goes to is a matter of principle because it will determine his future. She can’t give in. She has to fight for the boy and she has to win.

Yotam’s parents, for their part, aren’t thinking about the future. For them, the future has no meaning. Every night, before she goes to bed, Yotam’s mother prays that she’ll wake up in the morning and discover she’s been dreaming. So how can she think about the future. Or the present. Before Gidi died, they used to go out on Saturday trips with friends, the Lundys. Before Gidi died, she used to take Yotam’s father ballroom dancing in the community centre on Sundays. Now his head is always down. He can barely drag himself around. He comes to life only when the newspapers call. Or that damned Forum for Peace and Security. And she can barely move from place to place. She can hardly get through the days. She’d been a bookworm once. The people at the bookshop used to put aside selected titles they thought she’d need. But now she finds she just can’t read. She puts on her glasses, she tries, God knows. But thoughts slip away from her. Like shadows.

At the Madmonis’, there isn’t much reading going on either. Sometimes Nayim brings a Jewish newspaper with him. Saddiq already knows that he shouldn’t read the front page. It give him bad dreams. Since Itzhak Rabin died, everything seems to be coming apart at the seams. (And fate laughs: the Jews always said they couldn’t make peace with the Arab countries because too much depended on a single dictator who might suddenly be forced to flee.) So Saddiq leaves the headlines and takes the sports pages. He checks the English football scores, to see how his team, Liverpool, did that day.

And he peers over the top of the newspaper at the house across the way.

*

I climbed up the ramp that Amin built so I could read the sports pages where no one would bother me. And then, all of a sudden, I saw the door. I couldn’t see it before because we hadn’t built that high yet, but now, standing at the height of the electric wires and looking down, it stood out between the branches and leaves of the tree. A heavy door, made of iron, with engravings on the sides. Just like I remembered it. When we lived there, the door was at the front, naturally. With the Jews who live across from Madmoni, it’s the back door that leads nowhere. I slapped my forehead, why didn’t I think of that? I remembered the house from a different direction, and whenever I looked at it these last few months it was from the wrong direction. That’s why I couldn’t decide. I was so excited that I finally understood, I almost fell off the ramp; it’s a good thing I didn’t, because we don’t have insurance. I grabbed one of the iron bars, wiped my forehead with my shirt and looked at the house and the street. I tried to picture how the house looked when you saw it from the other side. And then, all of a sudden, while I was stretching myself to see better, I saw the old Jewish lady, the one who lives in the house, walking down the street carrying bags full of shopping. Without thinking too much, I jumped off the ramp, squeezed through the concrete pillars, crossed the street and ran up to her. I wanted to ask her to let me in, just for a minute, to see what was inside, to be sure, but my running scared her and she dropped all her bags on the pavement.

I was ashamed of myself, the way I scared a lady my mother’s age, so I bent down and started picking up all her stuff to put it back in the bags — cottage cheese, oranges, onions — but she started yelling thief! thief! and she hit me on the head with a baguette. I put my hands on my head and she kept on hitting my fingers, the way Ali Ahvis, the arithmetic teacher, used to hit us with a ruler. Stop, madam, stop, I’m helping you, I’m giving you a free delivery, I said, trying to explain to her, but she kept on hitting me with a baguette in one hand and a carrot in the other, and meanwhile, people started looking out of windows all around us. So I left her — who needs trouble like that? — and ran back to Madmoni. Luckily, the pickup had just come to drive us home before the neighbours had a chance to come outside and kick up a fuss. I even saw the old lady’s daughter — I think that’s her daughter, the one with the tiger eyes — come running over to her, before the pickup turned the corner. Ya Saddiq, inta majnoon, are you crazy? Amin asked and twisted his finger in the air like a screw. You want to get us all in trouble? And Nayim said, dahil allah, God help us if Rami the contractor hears about this, we’re finished. They were sitting across from me in the pickup and their eyes were red from the dust that gets into them every day. Allah satr, I reassured them. Nothing happened. All I did was help an old lady carry her bags. Is it my fault that she’s crazy? And besides, Rami needs us. To finish the building. Who else can finish the building? Angels?

*

The paper boy isn’t an angel or a cherub or a Beitar fan. He’s an older man. A factory manager who was fired two months ago and would rather deliver papers than be unemployed. And, besides, the early mornings when he doesn’t have to reveal his shame to the world are a time he enjoys. His wife is the only person to whom he told the truth. To his son he explained that the factory had a big order and he had to go in early because there was a lot of work to do. His voice shook when he lied, but the son — his mobile pressed to his ear — didn’t even hear.

Four-thirty in the morning. The sun is still only a rumour in the sky. The father is chugging along the street on his scooter tossing newspapers at the houses as he passes by. On the corner of Victory and Convoy Streets, a speeding car comes hurtling towards him out of the blue. He veers away and avoids a collision at the last moment. That’s the only thing he can do. But the street is slick and the scooter is old, and before he realises what’s happening, he’s sprawled face down on the ground, which is wet and cold. The car screeches to a halt. Three young men get out and walk tentatively towards him. He gets to his feet and waves his finger at them, ready to tell them it’s all their fault. What do you think you’re doing! In the middle of a residential street! You’re lucky I don’t call the police! But before he begins to speak, he sees through blurry eyes that one of the three is his oldest son. What are you doing here? he shouts, why aren’t you at home? The boy goes up to him, clasps his hands behind his back, and replies with some questions of his own. Are you OK? Are you hurt? Are you OK? I think so, the father says, feeling a bruised thigh, I just got knocked around a little. I’ll be all right. But why are you riding around at this time of night? We were at a party, is the son’s stammered reply, we just didn’t notice the time. You just didn’t notice … just didn’t notice … The father repeats his son’s words and one of the boys, probably the driver, lowers his eyes. But Dad, what are you doing here at four in the morning? the son asks, his voice full of surprise. And what are all those newspapers for? He picks a paper up off the street, looks at it and then gives his father a look he can’t ignore. Now it’s the father’s turn to be silent, to become reacquainted with his shoes. He steals a glance at his son’s friends in the hope they’ll understand that the answer won’t be given while they’re there. And after a few moments of silence (four people standing in the middle of the street, awkwardness filling the air) the friends say a polite excuse-us, and disappear into the darkness in their car.

Crickets chirp. Dogs bark. A father and son stand facing each other in the dark. They don’t know what to say to each other. The son is thinking: so this is why his father has been going to sleep so early and hardly speaks to his mother. This is why his eyes are so sad and you hardly ever hear him laugh. The father wonders whether it’s time to stop hiding. Or maybe he should say he’s doing a favour for a friend. But he decides to tell the truth in the end. The son doesn’t say a word, and he can feel his lower lip quiver. When his father has finished, he looks at the newspapers scattered on the street and asks, do you still have a lot more to deliver? It looks like we really ruined your morning. Maybe I can help you out. The father presses the light switch on his watch, and is upset to see how late it is. He really doesn’t need to get fired again. Getting fired from the factory caused him enough pain. When he hears what his son says, he hesitates: no, it’s too late. Go home to bed. You know your mother will be sitting up waiting for you. Don’t worry, the son insists, it’ll go faster if we do it together. He bends down and gathers the newspapers, one by one. The father picks up the scooter and opens the box on the back for his son. The boy arranges the newspapers neatly inside. The father locks the box and thinks: maybe things aren’t as bad as they seem. There they are — a team.

The dawn is hinting at its arrival as the first strips of light over the mountains begin to show. If there were roosters in the Castel, they’d be starting to crow. The son hugs his father from behind on the scooter, and the contact makes them both feel good. The wind blows through their hair and brings tears to their eyes. Sometimes they stop in front of a house and the father explains: we have to go around the garden and put it through the bars. Here, the lady of the house asked me to put the paper in a vase. Her neighbours steal it and sometimes she doesn’t see one for days. There’s a loose tile here. There’s a dog over there, so steer clear.

Towards the end, they reach the apartment where Noa and Amir live.

For these people, the father explains, you have to throw the paper on the roof. Why? Look at all those rocks. The guy I replaced broke his leg here in the dark. That I can do without. Besides, at first I saw that the papers were accumulating up there, but not now. They figured it out.

The son pulls a newspaper off the decreasing pile, takes aim and sends it flying through space. But he throws it too hard, and it lands in the wrong place.

*

Thwack. Moshe Zakian is woken up by a blunt object hitting his forehead. He opens his eyes in surprise. He’s not in his own bed. For a moment, it’s not clear how he got into this situation. What am I doing here? he asks himself in frustration. Suddenly, he notices a newspaper on the floor. He feels his forehead where it was struck a moment before. From where he’s lying, he can read the headlines, something about a security warning. Outside, it’s almost light. It’s cold, so he wraps the blanket around his body. Gradually, the morning clouds surrounding his thoughts disperse and Moshe Zakian is fully awake. What a shame. For a few days, his thoughts had given him a break. He’d fixed the dripping tap in the sink. Sima had baked a cake. He’d read bedtime stories to the children. She’d looked at him longingly from the living room. It had seemed that they were putting an end to their feud. But yesterday she went with Noa, the student, to the kindergarten on Elijah the Prophet Street and came back in a fighting mood. He sat in the living room, hugging a pillow, avoiding her eyes. He absorbed one volley. Then another. And he could feel his blood pressure rise. Finally, he answered her, still trying not to offend. But instead of focusing on the argument at hand, she’d attacked him for his pronunciation. The word’s dai-dactic, not dee-dactic, she’d said with a sneer, and he tightened his grip on the empty glass of juice and snapped, why can’t you stick to what we’re talking about, why do you keep trying to insult me? But she wouldn’t stop.

You don’t understand, Moshe, that’s exactly what it’s about. If you want him to talk that way too, send him to that kindergarten and he’ll turn out just like you.

If only — he thinks, counting the parts of himself that hurt — if only you’d stopped there, you’d be sleeping in a warm bed right now. If only he’d managed to get the conversation back on track in time, they could have reached an agreement somehow. But no. He insisted on charging through a bright red light with a bus full of rage. Like me? What do you mean, like me? It wouldn’t be so bad if he talks like me when he gets to be my age.

*

Talk to me, I say to Noa, I want to hear. But she scoots to the edge of the bed and curls up into a ball. She folds her long legs under her, and her black hair hides her face and twists around her neck. The brightly coloured top she wore to Bezalel today suddenly seems out of place. Her thighs, so white and delicious, are showing from under her dress, but this isn’t the time. She must have got a bad mark for something she handed in. I move closer and envelop her in a hug. More accurately, in the contours of a hug. She’s trembling in my arms. Probably crying. Like in Bob Dylan’s song, she acts just like a woman, but she breaks like a little girl. I hold her tight and whisper in her ear. Don’t worry, what do they know. What kind of people decide to be lecturers in Bezalel? The ones who don’t have enough talent. And then they take their frustration out on their students. She’s trembling harder. I try from another angle. You know I believe in you, don’t you? Don’t you? She nods slightly, almost imperceptibly, but it gives me hope. I kiss the part of her cheek that’s exposed. My lips linger on the salty skin. Noni, I really think your project was great. Your friends thought so too. So one lecturer didn’t like it, so what? In another five years, when he wants to see your exhibition in New York, tell him you’re sorry, but there are no more invitations, OK?

A tiny smile appears on her salty face. Appears and disappears. I keep on weaving the fantasy. You’ll walk around the hall that’s filled with your photographs and you won’t say a word, you’ll just listen to the hum of admiration coming from all those New York phonies. And in the morning, we’ll get up early and buy the Times, and there’ll be a review of your exhibition with the headline; Biggest Israeli Surprise Since Entebbe Raid. Or something like that. And the text will make special mention of the brilliant project on religion and God, and of the artist’s beautiful legs.

Smash.

One of those beautiful legs kicks me in the knee. Sorry, not her legs, but her compositional skill.

And what if they clobber the New York exhibition too, she asks, and turns over on to her back. She’s not curled up into a ball any more. She’s not crying. She’s looking at me with a half-bitter, half-grateful look in her eyes. We’ll go back to the Hilton, I suggest, wrinkle their sheets a little. And you’ll start working on your next exhibition. OK? OK, she says, mollified. Then she waits for a minute and asks me, looking completely serious: You’ll love me even if I’m a total failure for ever, won’t you?

*

After Amir drags Noa’s pain out of her, some of it remains in him.

And accumulates in his heart.

That’s how the law of the preservation of sadness operates, subtly.

*

It’s true. I shouldn’t have mentioned that Moshe never took all his exams. I know that’s a sensitive point with him, and it isn’t really fair to bring up something a man whispered to you once at night so you can win an argument. And anyway, there was only one test he didn’t take, English, and he’s planning to take it when Lilach gets a little older. Or when Liron starts school. I don’t remember. But with all due respect, none of that justifies what he’s doing. Not when there are two children in the house and one is pretending to be sleeping while he’s actually listening to every word. Not after the woman you’re planning to marry in a week took you to the Armon Hanatsiv promenade, sat you down on a bench and explained to you that she didn’t want any of that stuff in her life. That she’d had enough when she was a child, before her father left. The looks the neighbours gave them from their windows, the questions the children asked at school, eating supper the next day, trying so hard to chat and to smile that the muscles around their mouths hurt.

After he smashed the glass with his foot, the house was quiet. The only sound in the background while we looked at each other was the students’ happy music on the other side of the wall. I said to him: I want you to leave. Now. He didn’t say anything. I think he was just as shaken as I was. I went to the door, opened it and said: Come on. Go. I don’t want to see you. He closed it, leaned his back on it and tried to explain: I didn’t mean it, I don’t know what came over me. I’m sorry. Let’s talk. I moved him away, opened the door again and pushed him out with both hands. He didn’t resist, lifted his arms in the air, OK, OK. I slammed the door. I slid the bolt into place and stuck the key in the lock. I got a broom and a dustpan and swept up the pieces. The handle of the glass and another few large pieces were lying close to where he’d stepped on it, but the smaller splinters were scattered all over the living room: on the rug, behind the TV table, in the space under the sofa. While I was looking for them, I found Lilach’s plastic hammer. I’ve been looking for that toy for weeks. I put the broom and dustpan away in the space between the refrigerator and the wall and went to see how the kids were. Lilach was sleeping like a baby. I put the plastic hammer on the night table, a surprise for her in the morning. Liron was completely covered up, except for an elbow that stuck out. When he was younger, I was afraid he’d suffocate like that, without air, and I used to pull the blanket off his head every single night, but I saw that he did it himself anyway, in his sleep, and there was nothing to worry about. I walked over to his bed. The blanket was rising and falling too quickly. He was breathing too lightly for someone who was asleep. Could he have heard everything? And if he did, did he understand? It’s too bad we can’t ask him what he wants. Give him the chance to decide. After all, at a certain age, even children whose parents are divorced can decide who they want to stay with, the mother or the father. But Liron is still young. And anyway, what made me think of parents who are divorced? I stroked his back through the blanket. That’s our regular signal. If he’s awake and wants to, he turns over, opens his big eyes and starts talking: about the kids in kindergarten who always fight over who gets the purple paint; about the new computer game Daniel has and he wants too; about what’s hiding behind the stars in the sky. He didn’t turn around. He was entitled not to. I let him be and went out of the bedroom.

Moshe knocked at the door.

What do you want?

I have nowhere to go.

Very tragic. Go to your parents. (Tragic was Noa’s word. Was I actually starting to talk like Noa?)

They’ll ask me questions. Do you want them to ask me questions?

I don’t care.

OK, I get it. You’ve gone completely crazy. But I want you to know that it won’t help you.

We’ll see.

Then it was quiet outside. I couldn’t see anything when I looked through the peephole. But I could feel that he was still close by.

Sima?

What?

It’s freezing here. Could you please get me a blanket?

I’ll think about it.

OK, just think fast.

I went to get him a duvet. I climbed the ladder to the top shelf of the cupboard and took down the thin mattress we use for guests. And while I was doing it. I was thinking, maybe I’m exaggerating. We’ve been together for eight years and he’s never even once raised his voice to me. He was always calm and reasonable. Even now, it’s not as if he threw the glass at me. God forbid. He just put it on the rug and stepped on it. It’s a good thing his shoes have thick soles, or he would’ve cut the bottom of his foot. My sister Mirit’s voice was talking inside my head: Sima, did you lose your mind? You’re pushing things too close to the edge, men don’t like women with opinions. In the end, he’ll get sick of you and take himself a passenger, one of those women who sits behind the driver and laughs the whole way. A woman who won’t give him any trouble. So what’ll you do then, smartass? Where will you get the money to send Liron to private kindergarten? Give in, Sima, let him have his way. You saw what happened to Mum.

I don’t want to give in, I answered Mirit, and remembered those colouring books in the kindergarten on Elijah the Prophet Street, page after page of pictures of boys with skullcaps and prayer books, as if they were the only children in the world. Moshe’s being stubborn with me? So I’ll be stubborn with him. If it means I have to be alone, well, there’s nothing I can do about it. Besides, there are lots of men who’ll want me. I see how they look at me. Even Amir, the student, looks at me. I’ll go to work, what’s the big deal? I’ll manage, no one scares me. If my mother managed, so can I. Rabbi Menachem doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.

I opened the window and dropped the duvet and the mattress out. Then I went into the bedroom and got a blanket. The air blowing in from outside really was freezing. I’ll open the door for him in a little while. Or in the morning, at the latest. Before the Arab workers get here. The worker who attacked Gina keeps wandering around outside our house and I don’t want him to bump into Moshe by mistake.

*

Winter love in the Castel begins under the covers. First a little cuddling, a little snuggling till warmth begins to flow through the lovers. Then they peel off their clothes, piece by piece. Amir removes Noa’s pyjamas, the ones with the sheep. Then he wraps his arms around her. She sucks on his neck and dives under the heavy cover (Amir’s hug feels good, but it’s still cold in the room and she still has goose pimples all over). They lick and kiss in the dark, airless space under the blanket. Warm tongues find their way into ears. Slowly, they take off all their clothes except for their socks. Now they can pull down the upper part of the blanket, very gingerly, of course. Amir tries it. Noa doesn’t object. They blink in the light and take a deep breath. Their skin shines with sweet sweat. A sudden wind bangs against the windows and their desire grows. Their separateness comes undone, their souls intertwine, they blend into one. Later on, there might be pain, who knows. A fingernail might scratch. A hand might strike. Amir is into that. Noa isn’t crazy about those games, but lately, her partner seems to get carried away. For now, she tries not to care, as long as he doesn’t pull her hair. As long as he whispers loving words into her neck while he’s doing it — my darling, my only one –

And as long as he doesn’t steal the blanket away when they’re done.

*

I didn’t take a lot of pictures in the kindergarten. The teacher finally agreed after I pleaded and explained that I’m not from a newspaper, but I sensed that she didn’t trust me, and I didn’t want Sima to get thrown out because of me. But I did walk out of Shulamit’s Kindergarten with a few pictures, not good enough for my teachers, but interesting enough to keep for myself in a separate bag between the pages of my album. One picture shows a kid, shot from the back. He’s wearing a Chicago Bulls T-shirt with the number 23 — the number that Michael Jordan, ‘God’, wears. His black skullcap has slipped to the side of his head and he’s reading from a big book that, from its size, could be either a prayer book or a children’s book. There’s a picture of a rabbi hanging on the wall above him. Not Ovadia. Not Kaduri. Someone else. The framed rebbe is looking at the camera; the child isn’t. Then I took a series of pictures, not too many. Most of them are pretty ordinary, except for one that shows a boy whose curled sidelocks have fallen on to his cheeks and his little hand is resting on his heart as he stares longingly at a girl with a red hairband sitting next to him. But the most striking picture — which I added to my portfolio later — is of Dina, the teacher’s assistant. I asked her if I could take it when we were about to leave. I used a wide-angle lens to include in the frame the cardboard sign listing the advantages of the kindergarten. The sign said: Open from seven to four. Three full meals. Certified teachers. Under the supervision of the Ministry of Labour and Welfare. Reasonable prices.

Dina herself looks like another advantage of the kindergarten.

Looking at her, with her denim dress, her white long-sleeved top and the green shirt over it, you can’t help imagining how a pretty girl like her would look in a low-cut mini dress with her hair loose. I guess that she herself wasn’t concerned about that, because in the picture she’s completely relaxed. And beaming. Usually, when you look at a picture, you try to find the light source: the direction of the sunlight or the side the flash is on. In that picture, the light source is Dina herself. Her face is illuminated, her neck — the part that is exposed — is glowing, and her enormous green eyes (which are looking straight at the lens, just like I wanted) are gleaming. Dina was with us the entire time we were there, and I liked her from the first minute. The sound of her voice reminded me of my aunts on my father’s side, the side I liked, and I thought: if I had a child, I’d want him to have a kindergarten teacher like her. She walked around the kindergarten with us slowly, as if we weren’t disturbing her in the middle of the day, explained patiently how special the kindergarten was and answered Sima’s questions sincerely, even the provocative ones: Do they have to wear skullcaps? We don’t force anyone. The children themselves want to wear them. Could it happen that a boy comes home from kindergarten and tells his mother that she’s not dressed properly? Yes, things like that have happened. But on the other hand, we make it very clear to the children how important it is to honour their father and mother. Go to the kindergarten in Mevasseret, see how disrespectful the children are to their parents when they come to pick them up. You won’t see that here. And in Mevasseret, they’ll always look down on your son because he’s from the Castel. Here, everyone’s equal.

Sima nodded slightly, and I thought she was agreeing. Even I was having second thoughts when I heard what Dina had to say and especially when she stopped next to a boy who’d fallen in the sandbox and stroked his head until he calmed down.

*

On the way home, we didn’t speak. I let Sima absorb what she’d seen, kept my eyes on the uneven pavement and said to myself that I should fill all those holes with white sugar or salt and photograph them. I rolled around in my mouth the names of the streets we passed — Palmach Street, Convoy Street, Victory Lane — and thought that the War of Independence still hadn’t ended here. I thought that the empty basketball courts, especially the ones that had torn nets, could be an interesting subject for a project on loneliness. I smiled at the group of toothless old men watching us from a bench and, in my imagination, posed them for a class picture, with a little girl as their teacher standing beside them. And I planned an answer in case Sima asked my opinion.

But when we went into the house, she didn’t pour out her heart. All she did was ask me to keep an eye on Lilach for a minute, and went to have a shower. She stayed in the bathroom a long time — Lilach had already begun her pre-crying whining — and when she came out, she stood in front of the mirror in the living room combing her thin hair and said, I think best in the shower. Me too, I said. Every time I have to decide something important, I go into the shower. And she laughed. Ah, now I understand why we don’t have any hot water, and before I could fake an apology, she asked, one sugar, right? I said, don’t worry, I’ll make it, take Lilach for a while, she’s about to cry. Sima said, don’t be silly, those sounds are a sign that she’s happy. Can’t you see that she’s crazy about you? Don’t exaggerate, I protested, even though the compliment made me happy, and Sima took Lilach out of her cot and held her to her beautiful breasts, which were surprisingly firm after two babies, and asked, so what do you think about in the shower, Noa? I laughed: what do you mean? And she said, I tell you everything about myself, and you don’t tell me a thing. I’m starting to feel hurt. Don’t, I said, it takes me time to open up to people. And suddenly, as I was turning to take the milk out of the fridge, I wanted her not to give up, to keep on asking me. To get me to open up. Lately, I haven’t had any long talks with friends. After so many disappointments, Liat finally has someone serious, and although we met for coffee a year ago and she made fun of the women who ignore the rest of the world the minute they have a man, that’s exactly what’s happened with her. And Hila just came back from a trip to India, loaded with clothes in bright colours and black-and-white clichés — whatever happens is what’s supposed to happen, all rivers flow to the Ganges, that kind of stuff. I love her dearly, but if she tells me to go with the flow one more time when I tell her about something I’m upset about, I’ll just pull her short, annoying braids. No. I need someone who has no preconceived notions about me, someone who doesn’t already think Amir is fantastic, someone who won’t be worried about hurting my feelings, who’ll say what she thinks.

I brought the coffee over to the table, and before I could sit down, Sima’s question mark was already hanging in the air. So what happened with Amir? Nothing, I said, suddenly put off by the very directness I was hoping for from her. What makes you think something happened? I asked. She rocked Lilach and said, woman’s intuition, and I didn’t deny it, I didn’t try to gloss over it, but I didn’t really know what to tell her either, because it wasn’t really clear to me what, if anything, was bothering me, or how to translate the abstract feelings into concrete examples. But I started to talk anyway. I told her that I was a bit worried about that club for former mental patients where Amir volunteered. And that I thought it was having too much of an effect on him. Every night he has horrible dreams about the people there, dreams I can’t even listen to any more, but he keeps telling me every little detail anyway and he expects me to give him clever, carefully thought out interpretations. A few days ago, when I came home, I saw him through the window sitting in the living room talking to himself. I couldn’t hear anything, I just saw his lips moving, and maybe he was only singing along with the radio, but on the other hand, maybe he wasn’t. And then there’s all that time he spends with Yotam, the neighbour’s son, the one whose brother was killed. When I left the house, they were playing chess, and they probably still are. There’s something nice about it, true, but the boy’s in our house more than in his own, and sometimes, when I come home late, Amir acts weird, as if something is locked up inside him, and last Saturday we hardly touched each other, I mean, he came home from the club really down on Thursday and I was wiped out from Bezalel, and we didn’t actually fight, but every conversation we started turned into an argument and I found myself supporting experiments on animals and objecting to treating depression with drugs, or the opposite, just for the sake of argument, and the whole time, I felt something humming and buzzing in the background, like in the morning when Madmoni’s workers are drilling, do you know what I mean?

During that whole muddled speech, I was feeling that I couldn’t tell her the real truth. That there was something else behind all of that, something inaccessible to me. Like when you try to remember a word in English and it’s on the tip of your tongue but doesn’t come out.

Sima tasted her coffee and said: I didn’t know that he and Yotam were friends. It’s very nice of Amir to spend time with that boy. And I thought, oh no, it’s happening again, she’s falling in love with him, captivated by his good deeds, like my friends, like my parents. Like everyone.

*

It took me three months just to learn the functions of the chesspieces. I remember my father showing me over and over again the peculiar way the knight moves, two forward, one to the side. The sound of disappointment in his voice: What? You still don’t understand? Yotam, on the other hand, mastered the whole game in two weeks. He even caught on to castling very quickly. Maybe children today are used to that kind of thinking because they’re always on the computer. Maybe I was especialy slow because my teacher was too set on making me a champion. I don’t know. In any case, with Yotam, I very quickly moved from the status of omnipotent master to the status of an opponent who should be respected, but whose days of having the upper hand are clearly numbered.

There’s only one thing I can’t get him to understand no matter how hard I try: the idea that sometimes it’s worth sacrificing a pawn in order to achieve a greater, more important goal like defending the king or taking a bishop. He refuses to accept that and puts up a fierce fight to save the life of every one of his pawns.

Last Saturday, a winter sun suddenly appeared over Maoz Ziyon and we carried the folding table with the chessboard on it out to the empty lot. Yotam wanted to go outside and I was glad of the chance to get out of the field of high tension that had been buzzing between me and Noa since Thursday. They’d shot her down at school again, and I’d just come back from the club all shaken up: Dan, a shy, quiet man who spends most of his time playing draughts wasn’t there, and when I asked Nava why, she said he’d had a relapse and was back in the closed ward. When she said that in her cold, professional voice, I felt slightly dizzy and my knees shook. Dan was the sanest crazy person in the club. Conversations with him were a refreshing change from the strained talks with Shmuel, and I had the feeling that I was actually getting through to him and encouraging him. Obviously, I wasn’t. Obviously I didn’t understand anything. I went outside to inhale the fumes from the buses, and for the whole day, I couldn’t get myself to stay in the club for more than a few minutes at a time. I felt as if the walls were closing in on me. As if the drawings were laughing at me. And the cigarette smoke was winding around me like a rope. During the training session we had after the members left, I tried to talk about Dan, but Nava kept on shifting the discussion to the relations between the trio of volunteers until I gave up and said to myself that I’d talk to Noa about it instead. She’d help me put the crosshairs of my internal camera on the right spot. But when I got home and stumbled into the living room and said that Nava is driving me crazy, all Noa could say was that my shirt stank of cigarettes, as if I didn’t know, and that I should go and have a shower. I deliberately kept the shirt on and sat down on the sofa, and she said, OK, if you’re not going to have a shower, I will. I had a killer of a day and I have to wash it off me.

Yeah, I could’ve followed her, put the toilet seat down, sat and asked her in a sensitive tone what happened, but I felt as if I’d given her an opening that she hadn’t taken, so why should I take hers. I stayed sitting in the living room and looked at the blank TV screen, and a few minutes later, when she called my name, I pretended not to hear, but I was thinking what if something happened to her, what if she fell, but I still didn’t answer her. I stared at the walls and didn’t answer. I thought about how small the apartment was and didn’t answer. I thought about Dan from the club and didn’t answer. When she came out of the shower, dripping, she walked past me without saying a word.

*

Moshe is racing to Tiberias. It’s the only thing he can do. There’s rain on the window and it’s hot inside — inside the car and inside Moshe too. How could his wife have left him outside all night after their fight. How could she have thrown the blanket at him. How, how, how. He coughs. Vapour rises. He tries to consider possibilities, but everything melts in the blaze of his wrath. He’s not thinking about the kindergarten any more, he’s not thinking about the boy. All he wants is to be right. The bus descends to the Dead Sea; on the left is the tempting new casino in Jericho. He vacillates. Maybe he’ll stop there and play. Menachem’s in the yeshiva now anyway. No, he rebukes himself, and turns to the Jordan Valley Road, this can’t wait. I need help, without doubt. Menachem got him into this mess, so he’ll have to get him out. He reaches Tiberias, earlier than expected. The city is sooty and neglected. Balconies are on the verge of collapse. But the large yeshiva building is freshly painted. Even though he has no skullcap, he goes inside. Young students walk past him, looking at him in surprise. He stops one and asks if he can tell him where to find Menachem Zakian. If you mean Rabbi Zakian, the student says in a tone filled with awe, of course I can. Yes, Rabbi Zakian, Moshe confirms, and the student directs him to the end of the corridor. That is the Rabbi’s office, the last one. Moshe walks past the pictures of the tsaddikim quickly, to overcome his chagrin, hoping the door is open and his brother is in. But the door is closed and he has to tap hesitantly with his finger. There’s no answer until he knocks again, and then he hears his brother’s voice from inside: Come in! Come in!! He goes in, words of apology all ready. But when Menachem sees his face, he gets up and takes his hand. It’s an honour, he says, and pulls his brother to his chest in a warm embrace. He explains to his students: this is my brother, Moshe, who has come all the way from Jerusalem, the holy city. To what do we owe this honour, my brother? Moshe blushes. How can he reveal his shame in front of all these students. He doesn’t want their pity. No … that is, if we can talk, he begins to apologise. Menachem smiles into his eyes. Please, my brother, sit with us. We’ll be finished in a minute. In the meantime, you can listen to pearls of wisdom from these young scholars. Moshe obeys and sits down on a chair that’s a bit small for him. The students go back to praying, looking at the Rabbi with reverence in their eyes. On the agenda: Genesis, chapter 44, verse 18. Joseph pretends not to know his brothers, who are standing before him in Pharaoh’s palace, until he can no longer control the cries of longing rising in his throat. ‘Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all them that stood by him; and he cried: Cause every man to go out from me. And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known unto his brethren. And he wept aloud; and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard.’ Menachem reminds his students not to forget that these are the same brothers who threw him into the pit. Just because they were jealous of him. They threw him into the pit and walked away. But Joseph does not hold a grudge against them, God forbid, he forgives them. And why does he forgive them? What gives him the strength to forgive? ‘Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves,’ Joseph said to Reuven, ‘that ye sold me hither; for God did send me before you to preserve life.’ And what do we learn from this?

Moshe hears the words, but he’s preoccupied with last night’s fight and he doesn’t really absorb what they’re talking about. He waits impatiently for the lesson to be over and for the last student to go out. When they’re alone in the room, he pulls a chair over to his brother’s desk and looks at him, his eyes filled with gloom. His brother asks: is everything all right? No, Moshe replies, too tired to pretend. Now he tells Menachem the whole story from beginning to end. How Sima went to the kindergarten. And how she came back. What he said to her. What she said to him. How he put the glass under his foot and smashed it. When he comes to the part where Sima threw him out of the house, his voice cracks. It’s so hard to tell his brother these facts. But still, he plunges ahead: the bitter cold, the newspaper landing on his head. When he’s finished, he feels as if he’s run a marathon. All his strength is gone. He looks up at his brother: If you don’t help me, I can’t go on. Please give me some advice, and if possible, don’t quote some biblical verse that has more than one meaning, because the situation at home is getting worse. Menachem, who’s been silent till now, forgives his brother for his remark about the verse. He simply strokes his beard and shakes his head to some hidden tune. So what do you think you should do, he asks, and the question hangs in the air of the room. Moshe replies: I don’t know. Otherwise I wouldn’t have come here. Maybe I should take the boy to that kindergarten without asking her if I can? Maybe I should keep sleeping outside till she realises she’s made a mistake? I even thought of leaving the house tomorrow morning without giving her any warning. Leave the house? Without any warning? Menachem says, raising his voice, and Moshe recoils in alarm. Then he repeats his threat, but less convinced this time. Yes, leave. You don’t think it’s a good idea, Rabbi? And Menachem stands up, walks around the desk and bends forward until his face is close to his brother’s. Tell me, brother, without meaning any disrespect, did you hear what you said? Have you completely lost your head?

*

The first to greet me is Mordechai. He’s waiting impatiently in front of the entrance to the shelter, holding a photo album. I already know that the album contains pictures from his glory days as a goalkeeper for Ramat Amidar’s junior team. With the ball, without the ball, leaping across the goal, hugging the goalpost. And one picture of him with his father, after a game, their arms around each other’s shoulders, looking alike the way only a father and son can. Mordechai doesn’t remember that he’s already shown me the album several times, and he doesn’t remember my name either. He has some idea that I’m one of the student volunteers. But that’s all. When I cross the street and approach him, he introduces himself, asks if I’m on my way to the club and then opens the album for me. I listen patiently to his explanations — here we were playing against Bnei Yehuda, here I caught a ball that would’ve been a goal for sure — and I know that when he gets to the picture of him with his father, he’ll stop, look all around as if he’s revealing a top-security secret and then he’ll tell me about the night his father had a heart attack and he, Mordechai, the son who was always sick, suddenly had to do everything himself: call an ambulance, give his father artificial respiration according to the instructions they gave him on the phone, go to the hospital, wait on the bench outside the emergency room. Maybe you can tell me the rest inside the club, I suggest, taking a quick look at my watch. Nava the co-ordinator doesn’t like us to be late. Not that she’s openly angry at them, that wouldn’t be ‘psychological’ on her part. But she has her ways — a look here, a word there — to make you feel like a traitor. Mordechai refuses my invitation. He’d rather breathe a little more fresh air outside. He’ll probably try his luck again on the next person to arrive.

I open the iron door and start walking downstairs.

My steps are heavy, hesitant. My shoulders are stooped. Over the years and all the times I moved, I’ve discovered that I have two noticeably different ways of walking: the tense, stiff way when I hold all the air in my chest — the way I walk when I’m in a new place; and the open, confident walk when I throw my legs forward nonchalantly — the way I walk after I learn the rules and see that things aren’t as bad as I thought.

Inside, a strong odour assails me. Over the next few hours, my shirt will absorb it and then Noa will wrinkle her nose when I come into the house. It’s hard to describe that smell: cigarettes, sweat, but something else too, something unique to that place. Maybe loneliness. Joe is the first one to come over to me, waving a draughtboard. Wanna play? Since Dan was hospitalised, Joe has been my partner. He mops the floor with me. If draughts were an Olympic sport, the man would have a medal. Our games don’t usually last more than a few minutes, and between games, I try to get him to talk so I can understand what brought a man like him, who looks like an accountant, to a place like this. It was most likely a crisis with his ex-wife, but he doesn’t volunteer any details. Hold on a second, I say to him, I just got here. Let me put my things away. He takes a step back. I take a quick look over his shoulder and see that Shmuel isn’t there. I’m relieved and disappointed at the same time.

Nava and the other two students are standing in the other, smaller room. Right on time, Nava says. Somehow, coming from her, it sounds like an accusation. I walk past them and lean my bag and the big, card crossword puzzle against the wall. In our opening talk, Nava explained that each one of us had to organise an activity that involved something we’re interested in. Chanit jumped in and said she wanted to give a cooking course. Ronen, who’s also studying computer science, suggested something that had to do with science and I said I’m interested in lots of things, but none of them seem right for an activity here so I said I wanted to think about it. Nava raised a plucked eyebrow. Amir, she said, you should take into account that activities begin next week. No problem, I said, but it stressed me out a little. What’ll happen if I don’t get an idea? What am I, an idea man? It’s a good thing I have Noa at home. She has that ability to come up with nice, simple ideas like the kind that make you say, ‘How come nobody thought of that before?’ A crossword puzzle, she said. And she was right. The crossword puzzle idea turned into a great success, and even Nava, who didn’t show any particular enthusiasm at the beginning, was forced to admit that it was interesting to see how they co-operated with each other. Every week, I had to think up harder and harder clues to challenge the participants, whose number was increasing. Occasionally, they had surprising solutions that challenged me too. For example: Five letters, ending in y, what you feel when you do something wrong. Sorry? No. Worry. Or: Five letters, with an e in the middle, what you do when you’re not awake. Sleep? Of course not. Dream.

Shmuel only came to the first meeting of the crossword puzzle group. I think it’s childish, he explained. He was more interested in conversing (not in ‘talking’, but in ‘conversing’. He, like me, prefers beautiful words.)

Is Shmuel coming today? I ask Nava, and she nods. Yes, he went to the shop to buy milk for coffee. It’s his turn. Interesting, he asked about you too. What’s so interesting about that, I think. What?! I hate that remote, insinuating tone of hers. But I don’t say a word. She has to give us recommendations for a Master’s programme at the end of the year.

I already know that Shmuel will be waiting patiently for me till the crossword puzzle group breaks up for the day. He’ll sit in a corner, drink tea and he won’t talk to any members of the group. Every once in a while, he’ll smile, sometimes at a joke someone tells, sometimes at a silent, internal joke. Every once in a while, he’ll clean his scratched glasses on the collar of his shirt. When we’re finished, he won’t come right over to me, but he’ll give me time to roll up the card, to wash my face in the bathroom and have a short conversation with Chanit and Ronen. He’s in no rush. He knows that in the end, I’ll go over to him. He already understands how attracted I am to his complicated theories, to nice words. I’ve been musing over our last conversation: Amir, he’ll tell me when I sit down next to him, thereby cleverly touching on another one of my sensitive points: my need for continuity, my sense that there’s a point to all our conversations. Share your musings with me, I’ll reply, and rest my chin in my hand as a sign that I’m listening.

Cutting a piece of Scotch tape with my teeth, I remember that last time he explained to me again why God is transparent. How the entire Bible split into two and God passes transparently through the middle, between the red and the white. Man is always drawn to the edges: taking a bite of the red apple from the tree of knowledge, or a white apple from the tree of life. And God does not permit it. When he saw that I wasn’t attacking his theory — the way others who couldn’t control themselves undoubtedly had — he went on to explain in a different, lower tone that God had been revealed to him three times, on three junctions of pain (his expression). He described how God had appeared to him in three different forms at each of these junctions — as a dog, a beggar, a picture of a girl in a museum — and despite myself, I heard in my mind the voices of my socialist-bourgeois parents scornfully dismissing anything related to God. Wait, I replied to that voice, for this man, God is a surfboard. For this man, on the verge of drowning in a sea of churning emotions, God or, in this particular case, the primary, healthy inner voice appears and rescues him. What’s wrong with that? Why jeer at it?

I wonder what Shmuel’s going to talk about today, I ask myself and move away a little to check that the card is hanging straight. Will my heart pound in inexplicable terror again while we’re conversing?

The devotees of the crossword puzzle group — except for Dan, who probably won’t be coming — slowly gather around me. They say hello, shake my hand. They all have very limp handshakes and are quick to pull away. As if they’re afraid to infect or get infected with something. Malka with the messy hair has something to tell me, something important about her sister again. Her eyes are filled with longing, but I ask her to please wait until after we’re finished. Everyone sits down in front of the puzzle on the kind of squeaky, too-small chairs that even schools aren’t using any more. Amatzia, who keeps changing his mind, peeks into the room and asks if he can join the group. I invite him in, and he immediately sits on his heels and starts muttering to himself, no, no. He’ll do that another few times during the next hours, and every time, I’ll welcome him all over again, in the hope that this time he’ll work up the courage.

I ask if anyone wants to read the clues today instead of me. As usual, no one volunteers.

I point to the puzzle and read: one across, eight letters, quiet endurance.

*

Patience, my brother, this is not the way to be, Menachem explains to his younger brother and sits down across from him, knee touching knee. Those who are far from the Torah must be brought closer, not by force, but by wile. Moshe protests. But when we ate at your house, you said that I have to insist on getting what I want because this concerns the future of the family. Yes, Menachem says, his self-confidence still entirely intact, but let me tell you a parable from life, nothing abstract. When you’re swimming in the Kinneret and a wave comes towards you, you can smash it with your fist and fight against it, or you can give in, dive under it and then continue forward. What are you trying to say, asks Moshe, who didn’t like swimming a lot and wasn’t crazy about analogies either, abstract or not. What should I do, give in to Sima about the kindergarten? Just surrender? For now, Menachem suggests, let it go, put it aside. Let time take care of it. Bring home some books on Judaism, make sure you celebrate the holidays the way you should. You’ll see, if you do all that, the rest will take care of itself. Sima is a believer, and it’s only fear that’s keeping her from coming closer to religion. Give in to her now, and with God’s help, her heart will open in the end. Her heart will open in the end, Moshe repeats, shaking his head in disbelief. But Menachem puts his hand on his heart as if he’s about to swear an oath. You know, my brother, until five years ago, there were only four hundred yeshiva students in Tiberias? And now, may God be blessed, there are three thousand five hundred students, three large yeshivas, four kindergartens. Five seats on the city council. And, as God is my witness, we did it all through peaceful means. Without coercion. So what am I saying? Sleep at our place tonight, until your anger cools off. I’ll tell Bilha to make some kubeh khamusta. You’ll take some for Sima too, if there’s any left. And tomorrow morning you’ll say the morning prayer with me. We’ll pray for Father’s health too. He’ll be having the operation soon, and his health is more important than anything we’ve said here, that is certain. Then you’ll shave carefully, drive home and give in. What are you worried about? A little patience, my brother, and you’ll see that everything will work out.

*

You see, I say to Noa while I’m cutting a tomato — first slices, then along the length, then the width — I did a little thinking when Moshe was in Tiberias. And what did you decide? Noa asks, and on the other chopping board she cuts the yellow pepper she brought. I didn’t exactly decide, I say and slide the diced tomato into the bowl. She puts the pieces of pepper in too. Her pieces aren’t small enough for my taste, but I don’t say anything. So what conclusion did you come to? she asks and picks up an onion. She’ll be crying soon. I have this kind of exercise, I tell her, something that I always do when I can’t make up my mind about something. I close my eyes and picture every little thing about the two possibilities I have to choose from. Let’s say, in this case, I closed my eyes and pictured what my life would be like without Moshe. What it would be like to raise the kids without him. What it would be like to sleep without him. What it would be like to watch TV without putting my head on his shoulder when the programme is boring. And what did you feel? Noa asks in a voice choked with tears from the onion. Dizzy, I say. Dizzy. I felt like I was in an elevator going down the floors of a building and it keeps on going down past the parking floors, minus one, minus two, minus three, and it doesn’t stop going down even when there are no more parking floors. What did you feel when you pictured the other possibility? she asks me. That’s just it, I explain and add olive oil to the bowl, I didn’t have to picture the other possibility any more. Are you saying that you gave in? That Liron is going to the kindergarten? Noa asks, and the disappointment in her voice is as bitter as lettuce. No, I explain and mix the salad. The tomatoes that are on the bottom rise to the top. The corn that was on the top falls down to the bottom. How can that be? Noa asks and spreads her arms in confusion. We sit down at the table. I put some salad on her plate, check to see that Lilach is still sleeping, and explain. Moshe comes home yesterday, and before I can say anything, he takes my hand and his face is as serious as that man’s on the nine o’clock news. He sits me down here, at the table, and says, listen Sima, I thought about it, and I asked my brother Menachem’s advice, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to move Liron to a new kindergarten in the middle of the year. Let’s wait till next year and see how things develop, OK? O-ka-ay, I say as if I’m doing him a favour, but inside, I’m cracking up laughing. Do you get it? If he’d only let me talk first, I don’t know what I would’ve said. Oh Sima, Sima, Noa says, soaking up the salad dressing with a piece of black bread. With you, nothing’s sacred. Well I wouldn’t say that, I tell her with a little smile and get up to slice more bread. I cut another three even slices and one crooked slice that starts off thick and ends up thick. When I come back, I find Noa with her eyes closed, her lashes trembling, and a smile of pleasure on her lips. Is the salad that good, I ask her, and she opens one eye into a slit and says don’t disturb me, Sima, I’m in the middle. In the middle of what, I ask. Be quiet, she says, I’m picturing every little detail of my two choices.

*

No one mentioned my birthday. Not that I expected to be taken to Kenya on safari like Daniel from Mevasseret was, but I didn’t think they’d ignore it either. They actually know the date very well, and just to be on the safe side, I mentioned three times the week before that my class was arranging a party for me and I put a note on the fridge with the date written in huge numbers so even Mum without her glasses couldn’t miss it, but on that day, the guys from Gidi’s platoon came over at lunchtime. They were on their first leave since the incident and had decided to come to our house straight from the base, so there wasn’t time — they were sorry about that — to let us know in advance. Mum said, don’t be silly, you don’t have to let us know, and called Dad and said, Reuven, come home right away, Gidi’s friends are here, and Dad, who Mum always says wouldn’t leave work in the middle of the day even if World War III were starting, was home within fifteen minutes, even less, shaking the hands of all of Gidi’s buddies and saying to Mum, why don’t you offer them something to drink? She said, I did, but they didn’t want anything, and Dad said, make the boys some lemonade; don’t be shy, boys, make yourselves at home. He sat down on an armchair across from them and asked questions about the situation in Lebanon, about their commander, the redhead, how is he, and Mum came in with the lemonade and called me to come and see them, but I didn’t want to. I knew exactly how the conversation would go, they’d say again how much Gidi loved the company, even though every Saturday night he used to close the door to his room and cry because he was so miserable about having to go back to the base. They’d say again that he wanted to sign up for the regular army although I’d heard him say to his friend, Sarit, that even if they gave him a million dollars, he wouldn’t stay in the army one more day. And after they’d finish telling all those lies, which even my parents knew were lies, they’d give a blow-by-blow description of how he was killed in an ambush, which was something I didn’t want to hear.

OK, I’m just coming, I told Mum. Then I climbed out my window and started walking over to Amir and Noa’s place.

There was a strong wind, ice-lolly wrappers were blowing around in the air, and I almost fell twice. The Arab worker, the one all the mothers have been warning their kids about recently, was walking around in the empty lot. Up close, he looked old and not at all scary, but still, I didn’t understand what he was doing there. Should I get the soldiers who were in our house? I hid behind Gidi’s monument and watched him for a while, but he didn’t do anything interesting, didn’t bury a bomb, didn’t take out a knife, all he did was look at Avram and Gina’s house from a few different angles, then limp back to Madmoni’s site. No reason to get the soldiers, I thought, just a weird old man. I came out of my hiding place and ran to Amir and Noa’s apartment. Amir opened the door with a big smile: you beat me to it by a minute, he said. I was just on my way to your place to give you a present. A present? I said, surprised. How do you know it’s my birthday? A little bird told me, he said. What bird? I asked. Just kidding, he said, laughing. Last week, you only mentioned three times that Wednesday was your birthday. No way I could’ve missed it.

He took a large gift-wrapped box off the top of the TV and gave it to me. You can probably guess what it is, he said. Inside the wrapping was a shiny new chessboard. I opened it, and inside the board were the pieces, bigger than any of the ones we’d played with till now, and more nicely sculpted. The knight really looked like a horse, the rook really looked like a fortress. And the king’s crown was like the crown you see in educational TV programmes about Richard the Lionheart.

Next to the pieces was a small plastic bag. Open it, Amir said, handing it to me, it’s for you too. Inside the bag was a Beitar Jerusalem scarf, not like the nylon one I had, but a thick, woollen scarf with the menorah logo of my favourite football team, Beitar Jerusalem, printed on both ends.

Thank you, I said. It sounded like too little to me, that ‘thank you’, but I didn’t know what else to say.

T-h-a-n-k-y-o-u, Amir imitated me. Is that all? Do you know what it means for a Hapoel fan like me to buy a Beitar scarf? Do you know what they’d say in Bloomfield if they knew? Hey, gimme a hug.

After we broke in the new board with two straight games — I made Amir swear not to let me win just because it was my birthday, so I lost them both — Noa called and Amir said he had to meet her at the shops soon, in the supermarket, to buy flowers and candles for his friend David’s show. I gave him a normal hug goodbye, quicker than the first one, and went home with my new board. When I came in, Gidi’s friends were gone, and Dad was back at work. Mum was sitting in the living room looking at a new album I hadn’t seen before. I thought about slipping away to my room without talking, but she looked up from the album and asked, where were you? She didn’t say it as if she were planning to tell me off, but as if she’d been worried about me while I was gone. So I told her the truth, that I was at Amir’s. That student? Yes. Do you go there a lot? Yes. It’s a shame you didn’t sit with us for a little while, Yoti, you would have heard a few stories about Gidi. Do you miss him sometimes? Yes. And that Amir, tell me, what do you do together? Play chess. Chess? Since when do you play chess? Since he taught me how. OK, it looks like I have to meet him, that friend of yours, let’s go and see him. Now? Now. We can’t, he’s at the shops, buying things for his friend’s show. How do you know? He told me. Come on, Yoti, let’s go to his place together. But he went to the supermarket. Let’s try, the worst that can happen is that he won’t be there.

Mum put on her long black coat and we left. Walking down the stairs, it occurred to me that I never actually take this route to their place, along the street. I always take the shortcut through the lot, and now we went out to the pavement, turned left and walked on the road, close to each other, but not touching, and we went up the stairs that lead to the Zakian house — the strong wind almost blew me into my mother, but at the last minute I managed to stay on my feet — and as we climbed, I kept hoping that Amir had already left. Sure enough, when we got to the Zakian house, Moshe was standing outside with a cigarette in his hand and he said, welcome, and my mother pointed to the grey-tiled path and asked: is that the students’ apartment? Moshe said yes, but he just left and she’s not home, do you want to leave them a message? And Mum said no, we’ll come back another time, and Moshe said, you can come inside and have something to drink at our place, and Mum said no, thank you, another time.

That expression, ‘another time’, is the one my mother’s been using the most since Gidi. She says it to all her friends when they call to invite her over, and also every time I ask her to help me with my homework, and now, I thought, it looks like she’s going to celebrate my birthday ‘another time’ too. We did an about-face, and as we were walking down the steps to the street, Mum stroked my head. At first, I was so surprised that I didn’t know what was touching me and I almost hit her hand with my own, but when I understood, it felt good, and I walked more slowly to keep pace with her stroking, and she said, Yoti, tell that student to call in when he has a chance, OK? I said OK Mum, even though I knew I wouldn’t tell him because I wanted to keep Amir all to myself.

*

When Noa and Amir come home from the supermarket, the house is full of cooking smells. So what do you think, Amir asks as he uncovers the hole in the wall, did Moshe and Sima decide to make up? Did you hear anything at all? Yes, I think so, Noa says, otherwise Sima wouldn’t be making him chicken breasts on the grill. With mushroom sauce, Amir whispers, and tiny potatoes with dill. They stand there under the hole for a few minutes and try to see if they can tell — it’s kind of game they play — exactly what the Zakians are going to eat tonight from the smell.

Later, maybe because the game has made them hungry or maybe because the documentary on TV is about animal abuse, a kind of gloom seems to pervade the air of the living room. And they become immersed in their own worries. Noa is listing in her mind the names of the people who have already chosen a topic for their final project. And she’s torturing herself again because she hasn’t even picked a subject yet. Amir is thinking about the club and transparent Shmuel. And about the fact that tomorrow will be another grim day spent at home alone. They can’t talk over the TV announcer’s loud voice, and they don’t touch each other, out of choice. The bowls of tasteless soup they made in such a rush are sitting on the table, untouched. The sofa is hard, the heater’s dead and the water stain on the ceiling overhead is getting bigger. I might as well go to sleep, Noa thinks, but makes no move to go. Moods shift here like the weather in Modi’s letters, Amir thinks, and buries his fist in a cushion. Let him go to bed first, Noa thinks, I want to have some time without him. Let her go to bed first, Amir thinks, immediately surprised by the venom in his thoughts. He gives Noa his hand and their fingers interlock. Then he rubs his foot against the bottom of her sock. She looks at him and asks: is everything OK? And he answers — a shadow passing across his heart — yes, why are you asking me? No reason, she says, sounding panicky. He asks: is everything OK? Then watches her lips as she replies with a line from Boaz Sharabi’s song: Yes, no one dies of love any more. And he sings the next line, imitating Sharabi’s guttural voice: But without love, what is life really for? She smiles a superficial smile, turns off the TV and says: What a terrible programme. And a few seconds later, she adds: a real downer. And he swallows a surprising I’mout-of-here thought that rises up from somewhere deep. You’re right, he says. Come on, let’s go to sleep.

*

I don’t want to wait for her on Zakian’s steps. It’s too cold. And besides, why does she always have to be late? And then she’ll want to get changed and put on make-up, and I’ll end up missing David’s show. I’m going alone. If she doesn’t come in the next five minutes — I’m going alone. She just has to have all those scenes, so there’ll be a little tension, a little drama, otherwise she can’t create, right? Look who’s talking, Mister I’m-Out-of-Here. What was that supposed to be last night? You’re sitting in the living room, all cosy and comfy, eating soup — what could be more wintry than that? — and you start with those prickly thoughts. What happened, things started feeling homey and you got scared? Addicted, that’s what you are. Addicted to change. You pretend that all you want is four walls, a home, and then, the minute it happens, you start planning your getaway. Wait, hold on a second, maybe I’m putting the wrong spin on things. Maybe I really do need to get away for a couple of days, to breathe the air of solitude. But how? I sink without her, revert to being a spectator, a moaner, a masturbator, and when she comes home, my whole body reaches out for her and I want to devour her, to peel and eat her, then listen to her stories with all those little details only she sees. But that’s not actually a contradiction, not at all, she can be fantastic and still suffocate you with that dissatisfaction of hers that bubbles over on to you too. Oh come on, what are you, a symbol of serenity? A logo for shanti? Get serious, don’t put it all on her. But it’s a fact that before we moved in together, it was different. Before you moved in together? It was a lie, a pretence sprinkled with enough bits of truth to make it work, and now — now you want to close the boot on her. Yes, don’t deny it. When you came back from the supermarket and she bent over to take the bags out, that’s exactly what you wanted to do, close the boot on her. That’s right. Your hand itched on the red metal and you almost slammed it shut. OK, it’s because you’re in the house all day, you don’t run, don’t play sports, and your best friend hasn’t had his bar mitzvah yet. You go on like that and you’ll end up being accepted into the Helping Hand Club. So, it’s time to get out of that loop before it winds itself around your neck. Get out of it, get out, get out. How did you fall into this anyway? When did it start? Noa’s late. She’s late. So what. Cool it.

All these shows start late anyway. I wonder what the songs will sound like. I know them from the guitar version. David used to play them during our long guard duty shifts in the army in a small sentry box with a broken window, and now we’ll hear how they sound with a group. I wonder what kind of audience there’ll be. Probably fans. It’ll probably be fun. I love going to shows with Noa. Music really turns her on. She flows with it. And when she dances, she closes her eyes, not like those girls who dance as if they’re paying taxes. If she’s wearing a dress, then you can just stand there and look at how beautiful she is, how her legs show when her dress lets them, how the lights flicker on her shoulders.

On the last night of the trip where we met, we all went to the disco at Kibbutz Mitzpe Shalem. We’d spent every day of the trek in the desert circling each other, throwing out a sentence, a look, a word, lingering on sarcastic remarks. But when I saw her dance, tossing her hair from side to side, pulling an imaginary rope with her elbows and swaying her hips, I felt something in that spot in my body that tells me how I really feel, the small delta made by the two arteries in my neck where they meet my chest, and I started wanting her.

Well, what do you know, here’s the van that brings her home. I recognise the squeal of its brakes. Eight thirty-two. Unbelievable. There’s still a chance we might get there on time.

*

The first photograph of the show is of the poster. Red background. Black letters (a combination of colours that rockers starting out seem to like). Their funny name, Licorice, is in huge letters, and under it, the names of the group members. David’s name is the same size as the others because ‘Just because I write the songs and sing them doesn’t mean I’m more important than the bass player.’ That’s what he told Amir when he showed us the sketch a week earlier, as excited as if the show was just about to go on in our living room. On the right of the poster, I managed (taking a professional risk, I went out into the street) to catch part of the door to the Pargod Club: a heavy wooden door with an arch on top and iron buttons on the side, the kind of door that, if you pass it during the day when it’s closed, you might easily think is a monastery door. Below the Licorice poster is a poster for a different show — you can see the date and one word of the group’s name, Shabess. I think the whole name is Shabess Dance, but I’m not sure. Behind, as background for the posters, is a greenish kiosk covered with notices. Behind that are a few Jerusalem stones that are part of a large wall, and behind the wall — this you can’t see in the photo — is the beginning of the Nachlaot neighbourhood, or more accurately, the nice part of Nachlaot, the one with the narrow lanes.

It was in those narrow lanes that Amir and I almost had our first kiss. It was two weeks after we started going out. We’d just come out of the cinema — Fearless with Jeff Bridges, which I saw not too long ago on the movie channel and it turned out not to be such a bad film — and we talked and talked about almost every possible subject: about the importance or unimportance of archaeology — on the one hand, what’s the point of digging up the past, but on the other, without the past, how can we understand the present; about Jerusalem as a place to live — on the one hand, it’s so beautiful, but on the other, a little too intense; about my dream of becoming a photographer, and about his dream — which he still wasn’t sure he could call a dream — of becoming a psychologist. We talked for hours, covering up the simple tension of when the kiss would come with long, complicated sentences. Every once in a while, we stopped next to an entrance with ornate ironwork, or a window through which the sound of a saxophone was coming, or an announcement about a special prayer meeting to be held in a square in front of a synagogue before the Sabbath. Finally, we sat down in a small park between buildings, on a bench that still smelt of fresh paint. The kiss was in the air, we even looked at each other’s lips while we talked, but we kept drawing out the tension longer and longer. Later, at four in the morning, when we were lying in my bed exhausted and purring after three times, one of them with the addition of mocha-vanilla ice-cream, Amir said that he hadn’t been sure I wanted him. That he was afraid I was interested in him only as a friend. I don’t know. I think we both — after all, I was there too, and in the past, I’d bent first to kiss guys — waited with the first kiss because we knew that after it, there’d be no going back.

After I took pictures outside the club, we went inside with our heads bent so as not to bump into the low ceiling. I’d already been to the Pargod a few times (in my freshman year, I saw the Brera Tivit group three times, each show more thrilling than the others), but still, even this time, going into the club was a surprise: This is the whole deal? This is the Pargod? A small, cramped space with ten rows of plastic chairs, a narrow aisle, damp walls. If it had stalactites and stalagmites, it could officially be called a cave. While Amir was buying tickets from the club owner, I studied his face. For the first time in months, the light was back. Those visits to the Helping Hand Club, the pressure of his studies, and something else, something he doesn’t talk about, had made him seem stooped. Three grey hairs had popped out in front, about five years too early. His twitch was twitching again. And the deep furrow on the right side of his face seemed to be getting deeper. But that night at the Pargod, everything was reversed. He smiled at everyone, hugged David’s mother in excitement, danced lightly as we walked to our seats and kissed me on the neck once a minute. I don’t believe it, he said and pointed at the lit stage where all the instruments were, I just don’t believe it. He drummed on his knee and mine, as if they were bongo drums, to the rhythm of the pre-show music, and I found myself again, for the millionth time, amazed by his ability to be really happy, with his whole heart, for other people. Without a drop of jealousy. Without a smidgen of egoism. He was just happy for David. So happy that when Licorice came hesitantly on to the stage, he leaped out of his seat as if they were nothing less than U2 and he dragged the whole audience in that little cubbyhole along with him into a cheering session — including David’s mother, who was trilling along with the cheering crowd — that went on for two straight minutes.

The show itself started with feedback — grating guitar squeals that startled the audience and caused a wave of embarrassed muttering. That’s what happens when your soundman is a teenager. But it got better. Licorice got more confident with each song, David’s voice opened up, the bass blossomed, the drummer came out of his hiding place behind the cymbals and reinforced David’s voice with his own soft, almost feminine voice, the audience of fans applauded during the choruses and lit their Zippos during the ballads, and the bald critic from the local newspaper — everyone knew who he was, but they tried not to show it — nodded at least twice in satisfaction. Every once in a while, through the screen of distortion, you could make out a few lines of the songs, such as ‘Love is a jittery DJ’, or ‘The dam on the I river has collapsed’, making me think that they should consider handing out lyrics during the performance, not just with the CDs. I had my usual attack of jealousy of musicians because they can create together and help each other create individually, because they can signal each other with a look, with the strum of a guitar, that it’s time to end the song, while photographers have to make all their decisions alone and make mistakes, mistakes all the time.

Towards the end of the show, I even managed to forget that I was at the performance of someone I know. I closed my eyes and just let the music fuse with my body and take me off on a trip. During one instrumental passage, I was on a yellow hill in the Negev leading a herd of red goats. In another, stormier passage, I found myself in the middle of a brightly coloured festival in a village from One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Modi appeared in front of me and handed me a purple cocktail.

After the last song — a weird reggae version of Benzine’s ‘Freedom is completely alone’ — the audience naturally called for an encore. Licorice didn’t bother with the usual ritual of walking off and then walking back on to the stage at the audience’s insistence because they didn’t exactly have anywhere to walk off to, so they stayed on the low stage. The guitarist exchanged his electric guitar for an acoustic one. David took the microphone in his hand and spoke. His voice was hoarse from so much singing. His forehead glistened with sweat from the heat of the spotlights. I remember almost every word. ‘I want to thank everyone who came tonight. I won’t say you were a wonderful audience, because that’s bullshit. You were a loving audience. I only hope we have audiences like you at all our performances. (Wild applause.) I want to give special thanks to three people without whom I wouldn’t be here today. Yoni, Matan and Amir (here, Amir squeezed my thigh). Without their love and affection, I wouldn’t have survived the last few weeks and I wouldn’t be standing here now. I dedicate this next song, “Spread your Grace”, to them. I think that this is a time when a little grace wouldn’t hurt any of us.’

In the second photo of the show, David and Amir are hugging. After ‘Spread’ — I’d heard its hymn-like chorus many times in our living room, so I could join in — the lights were turned on and the audience went up to congratulate the members of the group. There was a short line, like the kind you have at weddings after the ceremony, and I waited with my flash for the minute that Amir came up to David, moving around constantly to find a place where no one could come between me and them. The picture itself shows David’s face over Amir’s shoulder. His eyes are closed, his eyebrows a little wild. His lips are stretched almost into a smile. Amir is slightly bent, his shirt pulled up, exposing a little bit of his back. His right hand is reaching out, pulling David to him for a manly hug. In the background, some guy is making a speech to a woman — the fabric of her trousers is the kind older women wear, so she must have been David’s mother — and his mane of hair spills out of the frame. The kid who did the sound is behind them, bending to pick up a cable. And all the other details are swallowed up in darkness. In the black hole. Not the photograph of the century in terms of light, but I still like it because of David’s half-smile and because if you bring it close to your face, you can actually smell that smell, the one that exists only at shows like that: a combination of cigarettes, sweat and excitement. On the way home, we tried to guess which of Licorice’s songs would be a hit on the radio. Amir remembered other details from the performance and recreated them with shining eyes. Did you notice how their bottles of water stayed full? They didn’t drink a drop. Did you see the drummer, the power he had? David says that in real life, he’s a pussycat. And the critic, did you see him? He went up to David after the show and said thank you. Thank you is good, right?

Of course thank you is good.

Amir took the turns going out of Jerusalem so fast that I was afraid his enthusiasm would propel us straight into the Mevasseret wadi, but I didn’t say anything. I enjoyed seeing him that way so much — excited, elated, alive — that I didn’t want to spoil it.

Back then I still thought I had control over what gets spoiled and what doesn’t.

*

You know, ya ibni, there’s something else I didn’t tell you, Mother says and closes her eyes. The rusty old key to that house is sitting between us on the small stool with the gold edging. She took it off her neck for the first time in forty-eight years — she never even took it off in the shower — but I still don’t take it. I’ve already told her about the house, and she didn’t yell. I’ve already described to her what it looks like from every angle, and she didn’t gesture with her hand for me to leave. Just the opposite. She added more signs for me to look for — there are two fig trees in front, a pomegranate tree at the back — so I’d be sure that was the place. But to reach out and take the key — I didn’t have the courage.

I was too ashamed to tell you this story, she goes on. But you, ya ibni, will be an old man yourself soon, and who knows how much time I have left to live. You have many years left, I want to say, but she silences me with a look. On the day the Jews came, she begins — but not in her story-telling voice, her large voice that makes you bend over and listen, but a quiet voice that I don’t know — on the day they came to drive us away, we didn’t take many things from the house. There was no time. The soldiers were already standing on the hills, and the stories about Dir Yassin were spreading through the village. You’ve heard about Dir Yassin, haven’t you? Everyone said that now, Dir Yassin would be here, in el-Castel, and fear entered out hearts. We were not thinking clearly, do you understand? We took a little rice, a little olive oil, a few pots, put it all on the donkey and started walking. I didn’t remember until a few hours later that I’d left something at home. The most important thing. I wanted to go back. I had to go back. But the soldiers fired over our heads and yelled yallah, go to Abdallah, the King of Jordan, and your father said, Ma’alish, we’ll be back in the village in another two weeks anyway. That’s why it’s remained there, since then, in the walls of the house.

What is it, ya umi? What are you talking about? I ask, and she puts her hand on mine and says, I can’t tell you that. You’ll see for yourself. Her hand shakes. I cover it with my other hand, and she covers that hand with hers. And we sit like that, with a tower of four hands, one on top of the other, for a few minutes without talking.

The muezzin starts calling, and his words come through the window with the wind. Children are yelling in the yard below. My father is coughing in the bedroom.

Finally, she takes her hand away, picks up the rusty key and hands it to me. Here, ya ibni, go to that house you are talking about and open the door. Maybe it’s from Allah that they took you to work in our village. I’m a stubborn old woman, but go there if you want to so much, and Allah will watch over you. Go, go and say hello to the spirit of Aziz. People say he’s still wandering around there, making the Jews crazy. Go and bring back black figs from the fig tree, go and pour lime on the ground near the mosque so the ants won’t get inside. And then, when you go to the house, go inside, don’t be ashamed, it’s your house, don’t apologise. If the Jews say anything, show them this. She goes to the cabinet, takes out the sura, the sack, and pulls a document out of it. I know that document: the last time I saw it was thirty years ago, when my wife’s family wanted to know what land the groom’s family owned. That’s how it was then. People believed that we’d all go home very soon and get our land back.

The certificate from the land registry office, Mother says and hands it to me. Her hands shake and the paper dances. People die, trees die, but the land stays for ever, she says. Mazbut, that’s true, I reply and use my sleeve to wipe off the dust that has collected on the paper. You guard this very very carefully, OK? She waves a threatening finger at me. I will, I promise, and put my hand over my shirt pocket.

Now listen well, she says, and lowers her voice as if she’s about to tell me a secret. I bend down to her. Above the door, under the ceiling, there’s one loose brick. Look for it and you’ll find it. I trust you, that’s your job, isn’t it? When you find it, take it out carefully. If that’s the right house, you’ll find a bag behind it with a lot of rolled-up newspaper inside. Wrapped in the newspaper is something that belongs to me. To my mother. Ya Saddiq, if you can, bring it here. And Allah will be with you.

Chorus

When I was ten

And Beitar was taking it on the chin

I’d promise God to obey His commandments

If only He’d make them win.

I’d keep the Sabbath

Wear a yarmulke on my head

And say the blessing over bread.

And now I call to him come back,

Come back to me

Spread your grace over me.

When I was fifteen

And my father was sick in bed

I’d beg for him to get well

And swear to do what the rabbi said.

I’d put on my prayer shawl,

Pray every day

And join a yeshiva not tomorrow, but today.

And now I call to him come back,

Come back to me

Spread your grace over me.

The dam has collapsed over the river I

Rivers of longing are drowning me alive

I’m about ready to say

I’m done for, no more

Spread, oh spread your grace over me.

I’ve broken my promises, the whole long list

And maybe You don’t even exist

But come back, come back to me

Spread your grace over me.

Music and lyrics: David Batsri

From the Licorice album, Love As I Explained it to My Wife

Produced independently, 1996