Of course, I said. I looked at her face in the rearview mirror. Nothing I saw indicated that she was worried or upset. She was only very pale. But I didn’t know her well enough to decide whether that was unusual.
You’re probably dying to get to the hotel already, she said, looking at me matter-of-factly. I’m really sorry we’re holding you up…Effi is going through a sensitive period now because of the business with Benjy—
It’s okay, I said. I’m in no hurry. But I have to say that something here…is not clear to me. If Effi…I mean, if that’s the experience he had in the army, then why—
The door opened suddenly and Effi stepped into the car, soaked to the bone. Snowflakes stuck to his greasy hair. His teeth chattered.
She shifted gears and began to drive.
Slowly, at first, as if she wanted to be sure he wouldn’t leap out again, and then at normal speed.
—
We were silent all the way to the hotel.
He looked too embarrassed to speak.
She looked like someone whose major concern was that everything would at least look normal again.
And I was afraid that anything I might say would stir up trouble again. At some point, I remember, she turned on the radio to make the silence less awkward, and of all the songs in the world, the Dolly Parton–Kenny Rogers duet filled the air.
Islands in the stream, that is what we are…Sail away with me to another world—
The third time Parton and Rogers sang the chorus, he reached out, pressed a button, and turned them off.
I really understood how he felt.
—
We reached the hotel parking bay. She turned half her body to me and said: Effi and I will pick you up at a quarter to seven. Is that okay with you? Wait for us at the entrance?
Her tone was forced. American. Dolly Parton–ish.
Thank you, that would be just great, I said with the same contagious inflection.
—
Effi didn’t come with her to pick me up at a quarter to seven. Instead, their Benjy was sitting in the backseat.
I looked at him through the mirror. Children are usually a fascinating combination of their parents, but that boy looked like he wasn’t part of them or of this place. I realized why he felt at home in Israel.
Effi sends his apologies for not joining us, she said. I think he’s caught a cold. What a winter we’re having this year, right Benjy?
Oh my God, totally. What’s it like in Israel now? Benjy asked.
Sunny, I admitted.
It’s never really cold in Israel, right?
—
Someone has to tell him, I said to myself. Someone has to tell him something, at least—so, unlike me, he’ll go into the army a bit more prepared.
I’d actually tried to prepare then. A week in Gadna, the pre-army field course. Lectures in school by army officers. Long talks with my father, who fought in the Six-Day War, and with Uncle Albert, a veteran of the Yom Kippur War. But I think that all the people in charge of smoothing my entry into army life had conspired together. None of them told me how difficult, how impossible it was to turn someone into a soldier overnight. None of them put a hand on my shoulder and warned me simply: For the next three years, your soul, not only your body, will be in danger.
—
On the way to the Jewish Community Center, we talked about the weather, Benjy and I. A little about the nightclubs in Tel Aviv. But every time I was about to break my silence, I pictured him screaming in response: Stop the car. And leaping out alone into the storm, which, through the window, looked even wilder now than it had in the afternoon. More dangerous.
His mother didn’t intervene in our idle conversation, only stole a quick, almost pleading glance at me every now and then. Her jaw was clenched.
—
The lecture itself was as embarrassing as all its predecessors on this Jewish American tour. I mean, the hall wasn’t completely empty. The amplifier worked. I read passages from my books. They asked questions. They even laughed once—except for Benjy’s mother, whose face remained impassive. But, as always in America, I had the feeling that there was some basic misunderstanding between me and the audience. A bottomless pit of expectations I could never meet. As if I didn’t conform to the image of an Israeli they had in their minds—or even worse, the Israel I described in my books didn’t resemble the one they wanted to see in their mind’s eye: the Israel of oranges, folk dancing, and Operation Entebbe. The only one who listened to me with yearning eyes, and even nodded occasionally in solidarity, was Benjy.
I’ve lost the audience anyway, I thought, so at least I can do something for the boy—
There was a copy of one of my books on the podium. I opened it, riffled through it for a few moments, and stopped on a random page.
It was in Nablus—I read straight from memory because I had never managed to write about that night—and they woke us up at two in the morning to clean slogans off the walls. There was this policy at the time of the first intifada: During the day, Palestinian kids sprayed anti-Israeli slogans on the walls of the Palestinian camp, and at night, Israeli soldiers went into the houses, pulled people out of their beds, and made them wipe away the slogans with their own hands.
We knocked on the door—or more accurately, banged on it—and an unshaven grandfather leaning on a cane opened it. We could see the trappings of an entire life behind him: couches, a TV, a sideboard, mattresses on which the family members slept. Alon, the commander of our platoon, ordered the grandfather, in Hebrew, to go out of the house.
