The Last Interview

In high school, we were a threesome: Ari, Hagai Carmeli, and me. Ari and I trusted and supported each other totally. Hagai Carmeli, you could only trust him as far as you could throw him. But I’ve never had the kind of soul-searching talks I had with him in his basement with anyone else. Not even later, with the women I loved, did I have conversations like that. We would play chess until midnight to the sounds of Pink Floyd, and then get into our sleeping bags and talk till morning. To the sounds of Pink Floyd. There was an old grandfather clock in the living room that used to chime really loudly on the hour, and that’s how we knew time was passing. At six in the morning, light would come in through the curtainless only window in the basement, and that’s how we knew that the night had ended. When I close my eyes now, I can hear Hagai Carmeli’s voice drifting over to me in the darkness of the basement, always a bit hoarse, the slow lilt of his speech a soft buffer against the very sharp things he sometimes said. “Tell me, man, don’t you feel…a little stupid when we sing ‘Wish You Were Here’? Everyone we know is pretty much here, right? So who’s left to miss?”

An intimate conversation with someone you’re close to is one of the greatest pleasures life has to offer. But for such a conversation to take place, you need a partner who knows how to listen and also how to confess. How to seek the truth without being hurtful. Unpredictable but not threatening. And of course, you need time. So that both sides can dig deep. And you need a place where all that can happen. In short, we’re talking about a miracle that takes place only rarely. And that miracle happened to me with Hagai Carmeli over and over again—before he disappeared.

It’s tempting to blame the army for the way his life got turned around. It adds an ideological layer to the story. And yes, the army really did screw him up. A series of unfortunate incidents possibly caused by his big mouth and his slowness, but also by the stupidity of the system, led to the most intelligent person I know ending up as a base maintenance worker. He transported gravel from one place to another in a wheelbarrow, swept sidewalks with a witch’s broom, and, as he walked the paths of the base, contemplated the unbearable heaviness of being. I used to visit him on the Saturdays he was confined to base for one reason or another, and we would sit in the sentry booth all night—his cocked weapon hanging across his short body, his curly red hair sprouting from under his helmet—and listen to Pink Floyd, cooking up schemes to help him transfer to another platoon, to a job that would truly enable him to contribute. Occasionally, we would go out for a slow walk, a very slow walk, around the booth so he wouldn’t fall asleep, and when he fell asleep anyway, I kept watch so his commander wouldn’t surprise us, ready to elbow him in the ribs to wake him, listening to the random words he muttered in his sleep, “No,” “Normandy,” “Twenty-two,” trying in vain to squeeze some meaning out of them.

He was finally discharged due to psychological problems.

But it wasn’t just the army that unhinged him. There was also that business about his little sister Danya. They were too close, almost joined at the hip. He never said it in so many words, but apparently, when they were teenagers, that closeness spilled over into forbidden territory. Or maybe it was just in his head, maybe he just fantasized a spill over, which in itself was forbidden. I’m not sure. That was the only subject he was silent about in our conversations. But I remember something he once said to me, in the basement (he spoke the kind of language that wasn’t ashamed to be beautiful, which also got him into trouble in the army), “I need to get as far away from her as possible. There are people who simply weren’t meant to live together in the same house.”

In the end, he left the country. Not because of her. And not because of the army. He got involved with the wrong people. After his early discharge, he became obsessed with making as much money as he could. He opened a café and closed it. He imported and exported. He bought and sold. When I asked what, he said, “You’re better off not knowing.”

With me, he only talked about what he would do with the money, a different grandiose plan every time: establish an NGO that would help soldiers in emotional distress, establish a museum of the Hebrew language, buy all the land adjoining Ga’ash Beach so no one could ever build there.

Then one night, when he was twenty-five, he pulled a vanishing act. It seems that he owed a lot of money to a lot of people and loan-shark thugs came by his apartment twice and broke windows.

He didn’t get in touch with me before he disappeared. Or after. I thought it was his way of protecting himself and was sure he’d come back. I give him a year, two at most, I told Ari. But three years later, there was still no sign of him on the horizon. And what was more upsetting: There was no sign of life. And even more upsetting: I was the only one who cared.

His father had died in the Yom Kippur War—Hagai was two then—and his mother developed Alzheimer’s at a relatively young age, and when I called her, she didn’t even remember who Hagai was.

So I called Danya. His sister.

A year earlier, by chance, I was sitting in a café where she was waitressing, and now I went back to that café. She was still working there, and she dashed around the tables with