No one notices, but all the female characters in my books are actually variations on the same three:
My wife.
The fictitious woman who is the negative image of my wife, the woman I had to give up any possibility of being with when I decided to get married.
The woman who is me.
I’m embarrassed to admit that it’s the third woman I’m most attracted to. How do you deal with the exposure involved in publishing a book?
I googled myself once. What a mistake. I spent all night reading things people wrote about me. Once, during a school trip, I pretended to be asleep and heard two kids talking. About me. This time, there were a lot more than two. Maybe a thousand. Maybe two. On one site, they even posted a picture of the sunspots I have on my cheeks and demonstrated how to photoshop them out. I finally went to sleep at four in the morning. The nasty retorts kept rising in my throat. I spooned myself against Dikla’s back. Once, when I did that, she would take my hand and put it on her heart. Not lately. Lately, I’m no longer sure she loves me. Nevertheless, I matched the rhythm of my breathing to hers and whispered to myself: I have a home. I have a home. I have a home. I didn’t sleep a wink that night, and I suddenly began thinking about—of all people—a neighbor we’d had years ago. An elderly woman—you might even call her old—who once gave me a ride to the sea and, on the way, told me she belonged to a nudist group. And I, only nineteen, loved the idea and asked if I could join. To expose myself.
Dawn was already visible through the shutters. My wife was still breathing the even breaths of sleep.
Everything is foreseen, but there is freedom of choice. What kind of kid were you?
Too much like the crying kid whose picture hung on the wall of the medical clinic. While we waited our turn to see Dr. Schneidtesher, the other kids would point alternately at him and at me.
I delighted in imagining. Not reading but constantly imagining.
And I fell in love. Head over heels. With a different girl each time. But I never said anything to her. And I felt a persistent sense of longing. I remember myself, from an early age, always longing for what was gone. No one had died yet, but we kept moving house. I’d say goodbye to my old friends every summer, and every autumn I was supposed to find new ones. It’s not clear, by the way, that that’s the reason I felt a permanent sense of longing. Maybe that’s just how it is, some kids zigzag their way forward through life and others are steeped in longing for the past.
I try to isolate a concrete moment among all those emotional words. That’s what I ask my students to do, be concrete. Dismantle the feeling into specific pictures. But with all the pictures, I don’t know what—
I was six, maybe seven, and Grandpa Itzhak took me to an amusement park. He was pretty old already and didn’t have the strength or desire to go on the rides. So he just walked from ride to ride with me and occasionally convinced me to drink water from the army flask he’d brought with him. It was fine with me that he didn’t join me on the rides. Being alone didn’t frighten me then. I got on the roller coaster alone, happily, and didn’t scream at all, not even on the steep descents. I found the ghost train to be mostly amusing. The Ferris wheel was an opportunity to look down at the entire city from above. Not even a shadow of fear passed through me—until I reached the hall of mirrors.
A seemingly innocent attraction—so innocent that I don’t think it exists today.
All you had to do was find the right path from the entrance to the exit in a hall lined with mirrors.
It started out fine. I took the first and second turns in the labyrinth quite confidently, but then I became trapped inside my own reflections. I remember the moment: I was surrounded by many distorted images that did and didn’t look like me. Some of them had a large head and skinny legs, others the opposite, fat legs and the head of an alien. I felt slightly dizzy and had a strong feeling I’d never had before of no way out. I tried to keep walking, but wherever I turned, I encountered my distorted self. Again and again. In the end, I collapsed, defeated, into a sitting position, my back against a wall, and thought, there’s no point in calling for help because Grandpa doesn’t hear well without his hearing aid. And I thought, I will never get out of here.
Now I suddenly realize how similar that is to the nightmare Dikla woke up from in terror during our first years together. She would jolt upright and pound her chest as if she were choking. Then she would look at me with wide-open eyes, not knowing who I was, and when she suddenly recognized me, she’d ask me to hug her. I didn’t have to ask her what happened, I knew that she’d once again been trapped in the classroom and couldn’t get out because the terrorists were guarding the door, and she tried to open the window so she could get away and couldn’t do it. (In life, not in nightmares, the tragedy in Ma’alot happened when her mother was pregnant with her. The ninth month. They lived right next to the school the terrorists had invaded, and when her mother heard the children’s screams, she ran into her neighbor’s house, where she knew they had a hunting rifle.)
It’s amazing, I think, that two people whose worst nightmare is to
