I’m not exaggerating. It’s a matter of life and death for me. It always has been.
Sometimes I imagine your last trip, from La Paz to Coroico. If I close my eyes and really concentrate, it’s as if I’m with you and your friends in the van. I’m sitting beside you. Fear is making you sweat, and I smell the sweet scent. You’re wearing fisherman’s pants tied with a string, and your legs are pressed against each other. Our knees are almost touching. And on the turns, they do touch. Did you know that I once traveled on that hellish road too? When your mother came over to me with the picture after my lecture in Ganei Tikva, I didn’t tell her. I didn’t want to hurt her with the fact that I survived. But I’d also been warned about that road, twenty years before you were, and I didn’t pay any attention either. When you’re twenty-something, warnings are like flies you shoo away with your hand. But I remember that during the first hour of the ride, I realized I was in real danger. The lane was terrifyingly narrow and three days of constant rain had softened the shoulders, turning them into mud. Every time a van came from the opposite direction, our driver executed some frightening and risky maneuvers in reverse: In order to let the other van pass us, he had to pull back so that the rear end of our van was almost hanging over the ravine, but not completely, because then the center of gravity might move too far back.
At some point I closed my eyes. I couldn’t keep looking into the chasm that opened beneath us without getting seriously dizzy. Did you close your eyes too? Or maybe you opened them when the drop began? Whenever I picture that precise moment of your final trek, I suddenly feel a powerful desire—idiotic but powerful—to save you. After all, I took a medic’s course in the army. If I had reached you in time, and not twenty-four hours later, like those useless Bolivians, maybe I could have saved you. I don’t know whether you had a normal life, and even if you did, after a five-hundred-meter drop in a van that turned over at least six times before it stopped at the bottom of the wadi—but maybe, who knows, who can know…
I kept my eyes closed almost all the way to Coroico, opening them only when there were potholes and the van juddered.
The two Germans who were with me didn’t speak, either. I remember that one of them had a book. He held it open as if he were calm enough to read, but he didn’t turn a page for a long time.
Suddenly it turned very cold.
Each of us huddled into his poncho.
The German with the book closed it and pushed it under his thigh.
A list of things I still hadn’t done passed through my mind: becoming a father, publishing a book, learning to scuba dive. Silently, I recited the haftora from my bar mitzvah from beginning to end three times. I shoved my hands under my thighs to keep them from shaking. I wanted so much to live then. I mean—
I think I already knew then that life brings pain. Of course I knew. But the proportions were different: There were more desires. The pain was duller.
Over this past year, because of the dysthymia, I sometimes wake up in the morning with a pain in my other heart, not the one that pumps blood but the one behind it that feels fear and anxiety, and the pain is so strong that I have to ask the question, THE question—
But until now, I always had a clear answer.
I would go over to your picture.
There’s a hint of a smile in the corner of your mouth. Not an actual smile. Definitely not laughter. More an inclination of the mouth that hints at an inclination of the soul toward goodness.
Do you understand? This entire year—maybe it’s even longer? It’s hard to know exactly when the deterioration began, or why, maybe Ari’s illness was the trigger, or Shira’s departure for Sde Boker. In any case, this last year I’ve been a musician who’s lost the rhythm of the piece he’s playing, in the middle of a performance, in front of hundreds of people. All the other musicians are waiting for him to get back in step. The audience is already whispering. But he can’t manage to do it. Every time I looked at your smile this last year, it reminded me that I haven’t always been like this. Which means that maybe this dysthymia thing is just a tunnel I have to pass through. Then I’ll reach the light.
I still have three cartons to unpack. We put them in my den temporarily, and they’ve been here, piled one on the
