In Watsu, it’s more like music: Something in the melody of the gliding signaled me.
The therapist returned me to the edge of the pool, still grasping my fingers, and then released them, one by one, until my hand was left floating on the water.
I dove. Resurfaced. Opened my eyes and said, Thank you.
You’re welcome, she said, and asked, What sign are you?
Pisces.
I could tell, she said, adding, you’re welcome to shower. I have to get moving, but I’ll leave you some tea and dates on the table.
—
I drank the tea and thought, Body therapy works much better for me than talk therapy. The body can’t lie.
After the lecture in Safed, I drove to Haifa, to that store in Hadar, and found a rare David Bowie CD for Dikla. It had only Bowie’s voice singing the whole Ziggy Stardust album a capella, clean, exposed, no embellishment, no arrangement. I put it on the passenger seat. I touched the bag occasionally, thinking that Noam’s bat mitzvah was still a few months away and maybe all was not lost. What question that you have never been asked would you like to be asked?
What do you think about when a German actor stands on a stage in Munich and reads a forty-minute passage from one of your books? No, really. You pretend you’re listening to him. You have to pretend. There are people in the audience. Not many, but there they are. Well-dressed. The Holocaust is always in the background of every event in Germany, lending it an air of gravity. And yes, for the first minute, you’re still looking for Hagai Carmeli in the sparse audience, but then you have another thirty-nine minutes, and you can’t really spend thirty-nine minutes listening to a text you don’t understand a word of. So where do your thoughts wander? How many of them are devoted to Ari, who is dying the hospital? How many to your wife, who continues to be cold and distant? How many to women who aren’t your wife? How many to your daughter, who left for boarding school and doesn’t want to speak to you? How many to guessing which of the silver-haired people in the hall were in the SS? How many to what the exchange rate of the euro is? And could it be that right then, as your thoughts wander freely and your body is relaxed, free of any obligation, the seed of your next book is born? Could you write in a language that isn’t Hebrew?
No way. In your opinion, what role should the Jews of the Diaspora play in relation to Israel?
They should come to meetings with Israeli writers.
Because no one else does anymore.
Except for BDS members, who stand up and leave the hall together, in open protest, as soon as you begin to speak, leaving you alone with the presenter and the interpreter. And the two girls from the publishing house who are constantly checking messages on their cell phones. Obviously, former Israelis come to hear your lectures abroad. How do those encounters make you feel?
She comes into the hall a bit late. She was always a bit late for our dates. I would wait for her on the bench in the park near her parents’ house on Harufeh Street and build up my expectations. I recognize her immediately, even though it’s been nine years since I saw her last, during Book Week, when the event still took place in Yarkon Park. We used to meet there, as if by accident; she worked for Steimatzky, the book distributor, and I was autographing books at a stand, knowing that at some point, she’d come to see me, and, sitting so close to each other that our chairs almost touched, we’d talk. Rather, she would talk, and I would mainly listen. As usual. And when I caught a whiff of the scent of her hair, something inside me was aroused. An echo of something. After we’d exchanged kisses on the cheek and she’d left, people, I mean men, would come up to me and ask about that woman I’d sat with for so long. I’d answer proudly, My first girlfriend, sometimes adding: For four years, from the middle of my senior year in high school until I was discharged from the army.
During one of those Book Week conversations, she told me that she was getting married. Even though I didn’t want to marry her, I was jealous. She had a beautiful coffee-colored birthmark to the left of her navel, and I loved to linger there, my lips on it, until moving farther down. And she had this gesture—running her fingers under her curls and shifting them, all at once, from left to right. And she played the flute very well, but not well enough for the army orchestra. She loved to tease me, didn’t get along with my mother, and unintentionally—sometimes intentionally—insulted the few girlfriends she had in high school by making tactless remarks. She sent me perfumed letters when I was in basic training and then the officer training course, and traveled from Haifa all the way south to Mitzpe Ramon on the Saturdays I stayed on the base, just to sleep with me and then go back. She was discharged a year before me, and went to work as a security checker at the airport. She sprayed a bit of perfume on herself at four in the morning, when she heard the short beep of the cab that had come to pick her up for work. But she quit that job after two months because she didn’t get along with the shift manager. She had to earn a living doing something, so she babysat for, among others, my older sister. Until the incident.
She didn’t want to go to the annual Arad music festival with me, a week after the incident, and didn’t answer when I asked if that was the
