I had intended to check my e-mails to make sure the Stockholm police had received the written testimony I’d sent them about Axel Wolff—and that’s how I found out.
In the middle of a class. His mother had sent me a short text.
You don’t need many words for the really important things.
I love you: three words.
Ari died, funeral tomorrow. Four words. You can’t walk out in the middle of a session and leave an entire class without a teacher. I listened to erotic texts and thought that Ari would have said that the situation was hysterically funny, and I thought, That’s it, I have no one to collect situations for. I wanted to cry, but crying in front of students is like crying in front of children, so I restrained myself until the last student, who’d forgotten her cardigan in the classroom, came back to get it, and then left. I turned off the lights and played a song he was crazy about on my phone (Ari didn’t just like songs, he was crazy about them).
She’s gone on her way. Oh Oh Oh Oh.
She’s gone on her way.
In large planes above the sea.
Where is she headed?
Where is she headed?
Then I locked up, turned on the alarm, and began to wander the streets of Jaffa. I couldn’t go back to my too-new apartment feeling like that. I had to find someone. Something. I stopped at a kiosk. Bought a bottle of Bitter Lemon in Ari’s memory and drank the bitterness down to the last drop. I thought, Maybe the guy behind the counter? We occasionally talked as Hapoel fans. But he was busy with customers who wanted to give him their betting forms for the British horse races, and I didn’t see how I could manage it. I crossed the street. The pitiful homeless guy was in his regular place near the trash cans. When I sometimes offer him leftover refreshments from the workshop, he takes them and says, Bless you. I threw the empty Bitter Lemon bottle into the trash and began walking toward him, really, I wanted to, but his head suddenly dropped to his chest. He’d fallen asleep. And I didn’t have the heart to wake him up. So I continued toward the area of bars. On the way, a charming couple passed me. He looked charming and she looked charming, and the way they walked beside each other—almost, but not really, touching—was charming. Even the way they looked at me seemed to say, “We have enough love. Want some leftovers?” So how could I interrupt them? And on a Thursday, no less. A second before they left for a weekend at a country B and B. I walked faster and went into an unpopular bar where I sometimes drink after the workshop. On Thursdays, in an attempt to attract more customers, the unpopular bar features a deejay, who plays hip-hop classics from the nineties. He plays them so loudly that if you want to order, you have to hold up the menu for Elad, the barman, and point to the drink you want, because there’s no way he can hear you. I pointed to Arak and grapefruit juice, and Elad brought me the tall glass. I took out the straw and drank it down in one swallow, caught his glance, and finally said—quietly, so he wouldn’t hear—My only friend is dead.
—
Dikla came to the funeral with me.
A few days after the bat mitzvah, we agreed—that is, she asked and I had no choice but to agree—that I would leave the house. I rented an apartment on a nearby street. I moved the few things that were “mine” and not “ours” into it. Mainly books. Nonetheless, Dikla came to the funeral with me. She didn’t just come with me. She picked me up in her company car and walked at my side as the coffin was taken to the grave. I thought it was a nice gesture on her part. And that if we hadn’t known each other and I was seeing her for the first time there, in the cemetery, with her button-down white blouse and her hair pinned back, I would have been turned on.
I thought that I didn’t regret a single one of the thousands of days we’d been together. It had been good. We’d been good. And even if our temporary separation becomes permanent, and a real, not imagined, messenger with divorce papers knocks on my door this week, she will always be the love of my life.
—
After I read my eulogy and went back to stand at her side, she groped for my hand and held it for the duration of the ceremony.
It had been clear to everyone, including me, that I would be the one to write the eulogy. But it took me long hours to write even a single word. Reading through the e-mails we’d written each other over the last few years, I came across something I’d written to him from London, a few months before they found the tumor.
—
Twenty-five years later, the major subjects of debate at the Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park are still the same: Muhammad, Jesus, the banks, it’s not easy to be a homosexual. And the grass is exactly the same color: English green. And it’s cold. But not cold enough to chill you to the bone.
Remember how we started arguing loudly then, about nothing, just to get people to gather around us?
Meanwhile, you’ve become a lawyer who argues cases in court. And I’ve found my own way to give voice to what was silent inside me.
I no longer need to stand on a bench to attract attention. And in the free time I have on my work trips, I’d rather watch. Do you feel that way too?
I don’t know why I’m writing you now.
Maybe because I miss you and the time when we had time to travel together to far-off places.
Maybe because
