No need.
There’s a Conference of Presidents, next week, kid. In New York.
I don’t know, Yoram. Let me think about it.
I only need you to write the opening and closing of the speech. No one listens to the middle anyway.
In English?
Of course in English. Obama will be there. Bill Clinton. Members of Congress. Henry Kissinger. And…your faithful servant.
He’s learned where to put the pauses, I thought.
Waiter! he shouted and rubbed his hands together once again. When the waiter arrived, he handed him his phone and asked him to snap a picture of us. “As a souvenir.”
Only when the camera flashed did I realize: Our picture. Together. In a café. He’d send it to the media. A picture is worth a thousand e-mails.
—
I wrote the Conference of Presidents speech for him. The one that made the analysts begin to talk about him as candidate for party leader.
—
Dikla and I watched the live broadcast of the speech together. It was back in the days when she rested her feet on me when we watched TV.
Sirkin held the corners of the lectern, and occasionally, with remarkably perfect timing, raised his right hand in the air to emphasize a point he was making.
I don’t believe a word he says, Dikla said, but he sure knows how to give a speech.
And he knows how to blackmail his speechwriters, I thought but didn’t say.
Tell me, she asked, was he really such a nebbish when you helped him run for mayor? It’s hard to believe that someone can change so totally.
He really was a nebbish, I said. But that was ten years ago and…he reinvented himself.
Now he’ll say something about Jerusalem, Dikla said. Somehow, they always get around to that.
Bull’s-eye, I thought but didn’t say.
Sirkin delivered the closing sentence I wrote for him about the capital of Israel, that the link between it and the Jewish people is unbreakable, pause, a Siamese connection, pause. He banged his fist on the podium for greater emphasis. And in response, the American Jews stood up and cheered.
How about that? Dikla said and pulled her feet off my lap.
What?
That image, “Siamese connection,” it’s in one of your books, isn’t it?
Wow, you’re right.
Could it be that the bastard is stealing images from you?
I don’t think so.
Sue him.
I don’t know, Diki. Let’s wait and see if it happens again. Otherwise, we don’t have a case.
—
I could have confessed to her right then. There were many other times like that, when I could have confessed. I passed up all of them.
—
In recent years, not a morning went by when I didn’t wake with a firm decision to stop it. Put an end to it once and for all.
But I don’t know how to anymore. Could you live and write in another country?
A trip to Arad to judge a local short-story contest. They don’t pay me, but I have a soft spot in my heart for that city, and lately, the farther away I get from home, the less pain I have in my posterior heart. The hills are surprisingly green, the trip shorter than I remembered. There used to be a music festival here. Every year, I would take the five o’clock morning bus to my aunt and uncle’s house a day before it and leave a day after, and the days in the middle were the happiest I ever had. After three nights of music and sleeping bags, my entire body pulsed with the beat of the bass, there was an on-the-verge-of-joy feeling in my throat, and everything seemed possible. I went to the festival for ten years straight (turn left at this traffic circle), once with a girl I was secretly in love with (I even kept it a secret from myself), once with Hagai Carmeli, who disappeared on me then, too, in the middle of the festival, and once with Dikla, who felt it was a little too much for her. That was where I first heard Brera Tivit and the band’s electrifying drumming of Shlomo Barr, that was where I first heard the Friends of Natasha sing the words “The ships of sorrow are drowning in the great sea of small hopes and wine.” That was where I jumped into the pool in the middle of a performance, slept in the middle of a performance, and kissed someone in the middle of a performance. That was where, after a performance, I walked to my aunt and uncle’s house in torn sandals as the darkness turned slowly into light.
A disaster happened the first year I didn’t go to the festival: The organizers had sold too many tickets, and in the beginning, two guys and a girl screamed because they were being crushed by the crowd. Then they had no more air at all. The festival ended that night, and ever since, any attempt to revive it has failed (here’s the Oron Performance Hall, there’s the place where the Black Israelites used to braid dreadlocks, and a bit farther, on the left, the head librarian is supposed to be waiting for me).
I make a desperate effort not to see what happened at the Arad music festival as a metaphor. Not to think about the fact that it happened three months before the Rabin assassination. Not to think that the avarice and the violence that brought about the disaster in Arad are exactly what is dragging us into the sinkhole now.
It’s not that I don’t have another country to go to. I do. To be honest about it, members of my generation have several other countries. But in none of them would I be asked to judge a short-story contest in a remote city, and on the way there, be flooded with sights and sounds and words. In none of them would the then and the now join together in such a way that it brings tears to
