I hesitated for a moment before telling him about the relationship that developed between me and Mayan after she died. But then I thought, if anyone could understand—
He nodded occasionally and looked at me nonjudgmentally, and when I finished telling him, he asked: Want something to drink?
He went and got some Zero for me and real Coke for himself.
He handed me the plastic cup and asked: Do you still have the picture?
Sure, I said. In my workroom.
He rubbed his beard, looking as if he’d just thought of something, and said, Remember how we used to go to the beach and I didn’t go into the water?
Of course I do, I said, you used to bring a chessboard with you. And play against yourself.
She taught me how to surf, Nirit, he said. Can you picture me surfing?
Then, in a choked voice, he said, She called me “Carmeli” and I called her “Cheeks,” because her cheeks were kind of plump. When I was with her, it felt like everything would work out.
The place they went to, he said, had no hope or loss, no regret or sorrow, not even pain, the place they were in had everything. It was a perfect place.
He didn’t have to say he was quoting a poem by Natan Zach.
We were silent for a while. All around us, people continued to talk about Ari and about Yoram Sirkin’s upsurge in the latest polls. Someone said that Sirkin couldn’t speak a single word of truth, someone else replied that there’s no such thing as truth anymore. Truth is passé. Trays of empanadas kept coming out of the kitchen. Ari’s photo album was passed around, and when it reached me, I couldn’t browse through it, not yet, it was too soon for me, so I handed it to Hagai, who, to my relief, also passed it on. Every now and then, I could hear Spanish break through the Hebrew. Outside the building, someone turned on a lawn mower. Hagai got up and came back with two empanadas, one for him and one for me. I remembered that, even when we used to sleep over in the basement of his house, he would always fuss around us, bring drinks, food, pillows to put under our sleeping bags, rekindle the embers of the conversation with a new subject, the neckline of our history teacher, Doreen Schwartz, black holes, The Hobbit, Maradona. When our eyelids had almost dropped, he would keep us awake by suggesting that each of us talk about his favorite masturbation fantasies. He would begin, and the others would follow. Their fantasies were always as bare-bones as a mug shot, and my turn came quickly. With me, there were obstacles, conflicts, rounded-out characters, and plots, so that by the time I finished speaking, everyone was fast asleep—except Ari. Before zipping up his sleeping bag for the night, he would say in a sleepy voice: Bro, I think you’re going to be a writer. But you have to learn when to stop.
—
I’m not going to write anymore, I told Hagai after the last sip.
Why not? he asked. There was no shock in his voice. And no reproach. Only pure interest. I remembered why I loved talking to him so much.
It doesn’t make me happy anymore.
So stop, he said.
I’ve become a liar, I said. An obsessive storyteller and a cannibal. Everything that happens is food for my stories, even when Dikla said, I’m leaving you not because I don’t love you anymore but because I don’t believe a word you say anymore—even then, I thought, that’s a powerful sentence, I should put it into a story—
If that’s the case—
And the world is overflowing with lies now, lies are the global currency these days.
There’s something in—
I feel like going out to play, man, to do something real, something concrete. Establish an NGO, run for the Knesset, castrate a pedophile—
Okay, you’ve convinced me. Maybe you really do need to stop writing for a while.
There’s only one text I have to finish, I said. And that’s it. Questions that some Internet site sent me a year ago. Maybe they’ve already forgotten the whole business, but I’ve been hanging on to it as if it were a lifesaver, because I had nothing else to hang on to this year. I always lie in those interviews, you know, give a writer’s answers. This time, I tried to answer honestly, or at least to move in the direction of honesty, and there was something liberating about it. In any case, I only have a few lines to finish, and then I’ll start a totally different life. Is there anything you want to add?
When the shivah was over, I went to do some things in the apartment.
I began with the kids’ rooms. I repainted the walls in bright colors. I filled them with light wooden furniture. I put surprises on each one’s pillow to make them happy on their coming visit: white chocolate for Yanai, The Guinness World Records for Noam, and an Adidas hat for Shira. Who, surprisingly, had said she wanted to come. I didn’t think it mattered what I did, there would be sadness in the air when they arrived. I didn’t think it mattered how much sadness there would be in the air when they arrived, I was going to fight for them. For them and for everything else that still isn’t lost here, in my home and my country. Dikla texted me: Is it okay if I bring them a little early? I have something at work. I thought she probably had a date and was lying to keep from hurting me. I texted her back: It’ll be fine. I was bitterly jealous of her date. I imagined what he looked like. I could guess what he looked like. A combination of Eran, the deputy director of marketing in her company, and Barack Obama. I unpacked the few things I’d
