I’ve been feeling like that for about five years already. Even though I manage to hide it from everyone. Even you.
And suddenly, here in the park, I had a kind of lucid moment, you know? For a second, I could see the inner reel of my life. The one that is usually hidden from me.
I don’t know if I can explain myself. But for a second, I could see that, despite everything, we managed to move out of square one, you and I. And if we did it once, there’s no reason we can’t to do it again. Right?
—
I couldn’t imagine getting through that entire letter without choking up in the middle.
So in the end, at the grave, I just talked about how Ari and I met. Not the story of the basketball court in Malcha Stadium. The real story.
Our Memorial Day ceremony in high school included a parade that ended in the soccer field. We marched in threes, in the blazing sun, as the names of the fallen were read. The list grew longer every year, and every year, a few students who couldn’t take the heat fainted and dropped onto the grass during the ceremony. Since the fainting was as age-old as the ceremony itself, “evacuation monitors” were appointed every year to silently and unemotionally carry the unconscious on a stretcher to the side of the field, where a medical crew waited.
Ari and I were monitors that year. On the days preceding the parade, we practiced opening the stretchers and carrying them, over and over again. But none of the teachers who taught us how to do it could have prepared us for the fact that Haim Huri was the first to fall.
Haim Huri was a head taller than us. And ten inches wider. Captain of the basketball team. Arm-wrestling champion of the class. But the year was 1985, the Israeli Army was still mired in Lebanon, many new names had been added to the list, and there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky to soften the sun. Haim Huri fell like a twig in the brief pause between the letters L and M.
Haim fell, Ari whispered to me.
We ran over to him with the stretcher, dutifully rolled his huge body onto it, and panting so much we could hardly breathe, raised the stretcher onto our shoulders and began walking.
The first aid station was about one hundred meters away. After about ten meters—we collapsed. The stretcher was too small, and Haim Huri slipped off. We tried to catch him—and we fell too. We picked ourselves up, put Haim back on the stretcher, and after another ten meters, my knees started to shake and I fell—and the stretcher, Haim Huri, and Ari fell on top of me.
Forget it, Ari said, I’ll take him and you take the stretcher.
To this day, I haven’t been able to figure out where he got the strength to carry Haim Huri piggyback.
But that’s what happened. He put him on his shoulders and started walking. I skipped after them with the stretcher. When we reached the first aid station, I was sure Ari would be angry at me. Or make fun of me. We were at the age when you elevate your own status by putting down others. Instead, Ari lay down on the grass, exhausted, and laughed at me. He laughed quietly—after all, we were in the middle of a Memorial Day ceremony—but there was no mistaking it: Ari thought that all of it had been more amusing than humiliating.
—
You gave me another pair of eyes, friend, I told him.
And I ended my eulogy with three lines from “Fall and Get Up,” by Shabak Samech, his favorite band.
Because there’s another place so sweet,
Where you have more time,
As much as you need.
—
After the funeral, we went to his parents’ house. I say “we,” in the plural, out of habit, even though Dikla apologized for not joining us, saying she had to go home and make supper for the kids. We stood at her car, in the dirt parking lot, and the embarrassment in the air strangely resembled the embarrassment that comes at the end of a first date.
Thank you for coming, I said.
What do you mean, of course I came.
I don’t know, I said. You were never crazy about Ari.
He introduced us, she said. He was a part of my life for twenty years.
Right.
What you said was nice, she said, and then quickly corrected herself. Not just nice. True.
Yes, true. I looked down.
I brought you this, she said and took the new Docaviv Film Festival program out of her bag. It came in the mail and—
Thank you for…thinking of me, I said.
And then, suddenly, she crossed the time that separated us and hugged me. She wrapped me in her two long, delicate arms. In the middle of the cemetery parking lot.
It had been weeks since a woman had hugged me.
We remained immersed in each other for a long time. Body inside body inside body.
Memory inside memory inside memory.
Finally, she broke away from me. Slowly. First her breasts. Then her neck. Then her arms.
Will you be okay? she asked. From a safe distance.
I nodded. And she got into her car.
—
The next day, I went to the shivah.
And also the day after that.
The pain of Ari’s death was too great for me to remain alone with it, so I found myself spending an entire week with the Strelin family. I didn’t sleep over. There was a limit. But I would come early in the morning and leave at night with the last of the visitors, carrying away with me the many trash bags that accumulated each day.
—
My thoughts that week were surprisingly lucid.
The dysthymia disappeared almost completely. Pills hadn’t made it go away. Sessions with psychologists hadn’t made it go away. Training
